


Two Sides of the Same Coin

by MaloryArcher



Series: #ClexaWeek2018 [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Clexa Week 2018, Clexaweek2018, Day Five, F/F, Rivals, Rivals in a Secret Relationship, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-25 18:02:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13840086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaloryArcher/pseuds/MaloryArcher
Summary: Clarke and Lexa have been convinced for years that the only thing they have in common is their love for their mutual best friend Lincoln. When Lincoln meets the girl of his dreams and has less time to spend with his two wildly different besties, it's up to Clarke and Lexa to find out whether they've been wrong about each other all along.





	1. Chapter 1

“Would you like to sit inside or outside?”

The host asks with an easy smile, three laminated menus already tucked in the crook of her elbow, and Lincoln just sighs.

“Inside, please,” Lexa says, but, in the same moment, Clarke is saying, “Outside, thanks.”

The host’s smile dims, just a bit, and she looks to Lincoln expectantly, which is just the worst, because then Lexa and Clarke do, too.

He wants to be impartial, knows before she opens her mouth that Clarke is going to say, “It’s a gorgeous day,” and that she’ll be right, even if he doesn’t agree with the pointed, “A little sun won’t hurt you.”

He doesn’t enjoy picking sides, mostly because it’s hard enough keeping track of whose side he was on most recently, but also because he can already hear Lexa’s, “It’s ninety-eight degrees, and that’s not accounting for the humidity,” and because it means he has to pretend not to hear the, “like you can afford any more sunburns before your skin turns to literal leather.” 

Lincoln sighs again, offers a tight-lipped smile to the host who’s lost that easy smile, and pulls the ever-present quarter out of his pocket.

Lexa and Clarke don’t make things easy.

“Call it in the air,” Lincoln says.

“Heads,” Clarke says first, not that it’s necessary by now. Lincoln can count on one hand the number of things his two best friends agree on.

He takes a tremendous amount of pride in knowing the first of those things is that Lincoln is the best friend in the world. The second is that, when Lincoln finds himself relying on a coin toss to stave off an argument, Clarke is always heads and Lexa is always tails.

The coin lands, and they put the poor host out of her misery.

 

 

It’s closer to one-hundred degrees with the humidity.

Clarke glows in the direct sunlight that slips past the awning on one side of the table, while Lincoln and Lexa sweat on the shadier side. In retrospect, Lincoln should’ve just sided with Lexa.

They order their drinks with much less controversy, although Lexa hits Clarke with an, “I don’t know how you can stomach all that sugar,” when Clarke asks for a flavored margarita, and Clarke counters with an, “It’s not my fault you don’t have a tolerance built up for anything that actually tastes good,” when Lexa orders an IPA.

“I think I might have the BLT,” Lincoln interjects, because sometimes it’s easier to distract them than to ask them to play nice.

“The surf and turf nachos are calling my name,” Clarke says, shooting Lincoln a grin. She drops her menu on the table, slips the sunglasses on her tank top over her eyes and adds, “Five bucks says Lexa’s getting the turkey club, mayo on the side, mustard on the side, half without tomat—”

“There’s nothing wrong with knowing what I like, especially if it saves me from randomly choosing something I’m allergic to,” Lexa says pointedly, dragging a hand through curly hair and rolling her eyes, “like Clarke is about to with the chopped mango.”

“I would’ve asked,” Clarke argues.

“Sure,” Lexa shrugs, “there’s no way you would’ve impulsively ordered and dug right in and then whined for hours about your itchy throat.”

They really aren’t always like this. Well, they are usually mutually antagonistic, but Lincoln is pretty sure Clarke and Lexa are even more irritable than usual lately. Lincoln knows for sure that he’s been contributing to that irritability.

When the waitress stops by, Clarke switches her order to something else, and Lexa starts to needle her about whether she even checked what’s in it, and Lincoln can feel the argument gearing up, so he interrupts after a long swig of his mojito.

“I have news,” Lincoln starts, wringing his hands together.

Keeping this friendship healthy, aka keeping Lexa and Clarke from killing each other, is Lincoln’s job. He’s Clarke’s best friend, and he’s Lexa’s best friend, and he’s arguably the only person who can coax them into a room together, ask them not to tear each other limb from limb, and not get wrecked in the carnage.

It’s his job, and the girls don’t always make it easy, but it’s always worthwhile. Lexa is sharp-tongued and levelheaded and will read any book Lincoln asks her to just so he has someone to discuss it with. Clarke is hilarious and compassionate and has talked Lincoln into at least eighty percent of the best spontaneous decisions of his life.

But, Lincoln’s been slacking.

He’s been falling down on the job ever since, “I met someone. A girl.”

That catches Clarke and Lexa’s attention, and, for once, they’re on the same page. His best friends both dart forward in their chairs, their eyes on Lincoln.

“A girl,” Lexa repeats, restraining her enthusiasm, while Clarke asks, “You’ve been holding out on us?”

“Yes and kind of,” Lincoln admits, “It’s new.”

New, but still. He thinks she might be _the_ girl. The one who could elevate the number of important women in his life from three to four: his mother, because, there’s no shame in this mama’s boy’s game; Clarke and Lexa, because they’re Clarke and Lexa; and now, “Her name’s Octavia.”

Octavia, who just might be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Octavia, who’s been getting the lion’s share of his time lately.

And, Octavia getting the bulk of his free time has meant Lexa and Clarke sharing plenty of scraps.

That new exhibit at the WWII museum he and Lexa were going to make a day trip out of visiting? Expanded to include Clarke, sulking silently through halls of rusty weaponry. Lincoln and Clarke’s plan to skate the night away at a themed roller disco? Reconfigured to include Lexa, hugging the wall ninety percent of the time and spending the other ten percent glaring at Clarke from the floor.

“Octavia, huh,” Clarke says, smirking and sipping her margarita, “I thought I was seeing less of you lately.”

“She must be something special,” Lexa says, “If you’re telling us about this.”

“She is,” Lincoln smiles, and, in that moment, all three of them know everything is about to change.

 

 

It isn’t a surprise to Lexa when she’s the first to arrive at the coffee house a couple weeks after her lunch with Lincoln and Clarke. She’s usually the first, much more comfortable being ten minutes early than late. The real surprise is Clarke, showing up only a few minutes late, and arriving before Lincoln.

Lexa already has her iced lavender latte in hand in front of her. She’s at a high-top table, in view of the door, but she isn’t paying much attention because she’s too absorbed in her phone, so Clarke catches her by surprise when she slides onto the chair opposite her with whatever her espresso-laden choice of the day is.

“No Lincoln yet,” Clarke asks.

“Hello, Clarke,” Lexa says, not glancing up from her phone, “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

“If we’re going to fake the pleasantries, you can at least pretend to look up from your phone,” Clarke tells her, leaning across the table to see what Lexa’s up to, “But, I’m downright peachy, thanks for asking.”

“Sorry,” Lexa tells her, turning her phone screen side down on the table, “I just feel like it’s more obvious I’m being insincere if I don’t look at you.”

“You’re not wrong,” Clarke shrugs and fiddles with the cardboard sleeve around her drink. “I thought you quit Tinder because it was too low brow for you.”

Lexa narrows her eyes at Clarke.

“I don’t appreciate you looking at my phone,” Lexa says, pulling it further from Clarke, even though it’s already face down.

“Don’t make it so easy, _Grandma_. Your font is enormous.”

“Yeah,” Lexa agrees, “and that’s probably why I’m the one of us who doesn’t need glasses.”

“I don’t wear glasses,” Clarke rolls her eyes.

“That’s my point,” Lexa says, “You squint to look at menus, _Grandma_.”

“You can’t just recycle my insult as your own.”

“I can if you can’t see it coming,” Lexa counters.

“Are you done trying to distract me from your Tinder desperation,” Clarke asks.

Lexa shifts in her seat and checks her watch. Lincoln is already almost fifteen minutes late.

“Last I checked, you were the one with…what was it? Tinder, Bumble, OK Cupid—”

“You’re forgetting HER,” Clarke says, unashamed, “but I’ve never gone on any rants pretending to be any better than any of the randos I’ve seen on those apps.”

“I’m not pretending to be better than anyone,” Lexa argues, “but way to take my words out of context.”

“What were they, then,” Clarke indulges, “enlighten me.”

“I just said I didn’t want some middle-aged married woman trying to treat me like a unicorn,” Lexa explains, “Or inviting me sleep with her gross husband or something.”

“You gotta keep an open mind with these things, Lexa,” Clarke says, and, if the other woman’s sneer is anything to go by, then she must not realize, “I’m joking. Jesus. For the record, I’m firmly against being solicited by those couples who take all their photos with their foreheads somehow simultaneously pressed together and cropped out.”

“Good to know,” Lexa says, “and, for the record, I wouldn’t respect you if you were letting those couples pick you up via Tinder. They always have the lowest quality pictures. Grainy and partially obscured.”

“Murder-y,” Clarke says, “They’re murder-y.”

That gets a laugh out of Lexa, and, for once, she and Clarke are laughing at the same time, and not at either of their expense.

“Lincoln’s standing us up, isn’t he,” Clarke asks when their laughter has petered out into silence.

“Looks that way,” Lexa sighs, and then neither woman really knows where to look or how to move forward.

 

 

It’s a bar this time. Lexa does her best not to be ridiculously early, which means she’s walking in the door at exactly a quarter past eight, although Clarke suggested they all meet up at eight seventeen because, “It’ll stand out more in your mind because it’s oddly specific.”

Lexa feels like it’s been ages since she’s gotten to properly sit down with Lincoln, even though it’s only been a couple weeks since he took her and Clarke out to apologize for forgetting about them to hang out with Octavia. They’ve crossed paths a few times, and he’s only a text or a call away, but Lexa’s missed him.

They aren’t kids anymore, drawn together by the classes they have in common or the proximity of living on campus. They’re adults, and they have jobs, and he has a blossoming romance with Octavia, who Lexa met very briefly days ago, but still hasn’t had time to interrogate, and Lexa is two dates in with a girl she met on Tinder, so she’s looking forward to tonight.

At seventeen minutes past eight, Lexa is standing near enough to the bar that she figures she might as well order, and she’s just caught the bartender’s eye when Clarke sidles up beside her.

“Clarke,” Lexa acknowledges, “you’re on time, more or less.”

“I told you,” the blonde says, “it’s easier to remember when—”

“So you’ve said. Several times.”

The bartender points at Lexa, tilts his ear in her direction, but, when she opens her mouth to ask for a beer, Clarke elbows her and reminds her, “It’s my night,” because, even if Lexa and Clarke are only friends in the sense that they love Lincoln, the three of them have a solid track record of taking turns buying drinks on rare nights like these, “and I’m actually about to start making decent money pretty soon here, so knock yourself out.”

“I’m going top shelf, then,” Lexa warns her.

Clarke rolls her eyes and turns to the bartender to say, “I’ll have a cosmopolitan, please, and she’ll have,” she trails off to look at Lexa.

“Whiskey sour with Buffalo Trace, thanks,” she orders, and watches the bartender shoot her an impressed nod. She looks to Clarke, who’s shamelessly checking out that bartender as he does his thing with pricey liquor. “I take it you got that design job.”

“Commission paid in advance,” Clarke grins, “and I’m in talks for the next one.”

“I can’t say I understand what you do,” Lexa admits, and she knows Clarke’s about to make some wisecrack about Lexa’s desk job, so she heads her off and says, “but congratulations. I know you’ve been waiting on this for a while.”

Clarke looks suspicious when she thanks her and admits, “Tonight’s going to be a celebration, so I hope you don’t think you’re tapping out early.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lexa laughs, although she’s notoriously the first one to want to go home after a couple drinks, “As long as you’re buying, I guess I can pretend to be invested in your professional success.”

 

 

Lincoln’s late. Like, very late, and Clarke and Lexa are each on their second drink by the time he returns their messages in the group text with a few crying emojis and a long apology for forgetting after a long day of work following a sleepless night with Octavia. He isn’t so direct, but Clarke interprets what he means, a little crudely, reading over Lexa’s shoulder.

“I guess we should…” Clarke trails off, and Lexa understands that the blonde is suggesting they call it a night.

“No way,” Lexa says, “You said we’re celebrating, and I’m getting a couple more drinks out of you.”

Clarke wraps her fingers around the stem of her cosmo, drains it, signals for another.

“You’re ordering my ride home, right,” the blonde checks.

“That’s the deal,” Lexa says, even though it would be Lincoln’s turn to make the arrangements, if he were here.

“Have you met her yet,” Clarke asks, fidgeting while she waits for her drink, “It seems like they’re getting kind of serious, but I haven’t met her yet.”

“Only briefly,” Lexa tells her, “they stopped by to pick up my tent for their camping trip.”

“She’s outdoorsy, then,” Clarke works out, nodding to herself, “That’s good, he needs outdoorsy. Is she hot?”

“Clarke.”

“This is important, Lexa,” she says entirely too seriously, “He’s our friend, but he’s also a total babe. Is she hot enough for Linc?”

“Fine. Very,” Lexa says.

“Ooh,” Clarke accuses, “you just called Lincoln’s girlfriend a hottie.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m telling,” Clarke teases.

“I hate you,” Lexa sing-songs, finishing off her whiskey, “and I’m going to drink your entire advance.”

 

 

Clarke is a little drunk. She knows she’s getting there because, when she visits the restroom for the umpteenth time while Lexa watches her drink in the booth they’ve moved to, the earth seems to shift within the cubicle.

She knows Lexa’s a little drunk, too, because, when she’s back, she talks the brunette into unlocking her phone, and it isn’t even hard.

“Can you unlock this,” Clarke asks, reaching for the phone nearest Lexa, “I want to creep on your Tinder babe,” and the brunette just does it.

All she wants in return is reciprocity, so Clarke unlocks her own phone, too, and hands it over.

Lexa is critiquing Clarke’s string of messages with “one of those” vegans on OK Cupid, who, according to Lexa, “is probably an anti-vaxxer, Clarke,” while Clarke checks out pictures of this Raven girl.

“I’m not saying don’t be suspicious of the FDA,” Lexa goes on, her nose wrinkling, “but, like, don’t shit on everything about modern medicine in a dating profile. Real question: do you have to do a cleanse before you meet her?”

“You work out a zillion times a week and drink green smoothies,” Clarke reminds her, settling on a picture of Lexa’s Tinder date with a boa constrictor draped along her shoulders, “you’re the authority, not me. How did you even swipe right on this girl? I mean, she’s a babe-and-a-half, and major points for aeronautics career. That’s big money, but aren’t you super afraid of snakes?”

“I don’t love them, but I doubt she’s a creepy snake person,” Lexa mumbles, distracted by Clarke’s match with a guy whose pictures are just him in a gym, muscles on display to varying degree in each picture. “Favorite books,” Lexa reads aloud, “ _Catcher in the Rye_ and _Frankenstein_? You know he read these in high school, right?”

“We aren’t all bookworms and engineers, Lexa,” Clarke laughs, checking out another match, “and at least, Huck has decent taste in music. Savannah. Twenty-seven. Her anthem: Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots. We get it. She has a radio.”

“Hunter,” Lexa corrects Clarke. “I don’t think this is going far if you can’t remember his name.”

“Hunter, then. Whatever,” Clarke frowns, “None of these are gonna work out. Raven’s definitely a creepy snake person, by the way. That thing that’s about to strangle her is called Skywalker, and it lives in her house. How you didn’t catch that in two dates is beyond me.”

“How do you know that,” Lexa asks, leaning over Clarke’s shoulder to see the message the blonde sent. She groans. “I would’ve been better off in the dark about that.”

“Shake it off,” Clarke says, raising the drink the bartender dropped off for her, “Here’s to wading through the dredges of the online dating world.”

“And to finding out that even the best of them are creepy snake people.”

 

 

Neither of them knows how they pull it off, but Clarke and Lexa manage to survive without killing each other until last call.

If they’re being honest, they have fun.

Clarke likes Lexa best when she’s looser, when she lets her hair down and has a few drinks and makes jokes that really shouldn’t be funny, but somehow are. And, Lexa’s used to party girl Griffin, but she likes Clarke best when her humor is ridiculously sly and she’s going into detail about something she loves but would sum up in a single joke in the light of day.

They down the last of their drinks, stumbling out of the bar arm-in arm.

Lexa says it’s just for balance, and Clarke jokes she should let Lexa fall on her ass, but neither of them let go while they wait for taxis.

Clarke is leaned up against Lexa’s side, amplifying the lingering warmth of the day, and the fingers of one hand are splayed on Lexa’s bicep, and they’re slumped back against one of the brick walls of the bar.

But then, Clarke’s fingers aren’t so much splayed as they are squeezing. Kneading, even, and then the blonde is looking down at that, as though it isn’t attached to her arm and she’s just as surprised as Lexa to see it on the move.

“How are your arms like this,” Clarke asks, and now she’s rubbing, just shamelessly watching her hand move along Lexa’s bare bicep under the shitty lighting of a street lamp.

“I work out,” Lexa tells her, looking from the roving grip on her arm to Clarke’s face.

“Oh yeah,” Clarke says, meeting her gaze.

They stare at each other for a few, tense seconds, and all Lexa can think is how bad of an idea she has.

The worst idea.

But Clarke, she must be having the same awful idea, because Lexa watches her wet her lips, and when Lexa breaks free of being mesmerized by that sight, Clarke is staring at her mouth.

“This is stupid, right,” Clarke asks, and, usually, Lexa’s the first one to shoot down a Clarke Griffin plan for being half-baked, but this time, she can only make herself nod.

It is stupid, but Lexa’s the one leaning in to press her lips to Clarke’s.

It’s such a dumb thing to do, and so Lexa’s pulling back almost as quickly as she descends, before she can even decide whether the kiss is anything special or not, but, then, Clarke’s letting her arm go and using both hands to cradle Lexa’s face so gently, stupidly gently, and guiding her back in.

And yeah, it’s stupid. But, the kiss _is_ something special, Lexa thinks.

She doesn’t even know if she likes the blonde, since being able to stand her company is still so new, but she likes the kissing thing.

She has Clarke in her arms, and she can taste Clarke’s drinks and a trace of the peanuts Lexa didn’t think she should eat from the open bowl on the bar, and Lexa won’t admit it until Clarke does—and Clarke is the most stubborn person she’s ever met in her life—but she’s kind of glad Lincoln bailed on them.

Which reminds her…

Lexa breaks the kiss, her hands clamped to Clarke’s hips, and asks, “What are we going to tell Linc about this?”

Clarke looks a little dazed, biting her lip and swallowing hard before she says, “Maybe we shouldn’t?”

“You’re probably right,” Lexa says, and, for once, she doesn’t wince upon admitting that Clarke was right. “He wouldn’t believe us anyway.”

Clarke and Lexa both laugh, and then they lean right back in.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke and Lexa elect not to tell Lincoln, because they've decided there's nothing to tell. Since it definitely won't happen again, they reason, there's no reason to make him think otherwise. Lincoln might just figure it out anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I am pretty vulnerable to online comments/requests for more content, I would like for the record to show that I always planned on writing a little more for these guys. The nice comments I got were a super sweet bonus.

“Are you crying,” Clarke asks, pulling back even before Lexa can fully relax the hand wound in her hair.

She’s upright in a flash, sitting back on her heels. Clarke’s hands are tense on her own thighs, and she’s looking anxiously down at Lexa. She’s still stark naked, her dress somewhere between the front door and the hallway outside of the bedroom, and Lexa is loath to admit that the view isn’t half bad, even if it’s a little blurry.

“No,” Lexa lies, trying to discreetly swipe at the few tears making a mad dash from the corner of her eye, “I’m not crying.”

“What did I do? Was that not—”

“I’m fine. Seriously,” Lexa says.

“You’re—” Clarke gestures at Lexa’s face.

“It’s nothing,” Lexa tells her between sniffles, “it’s…god, I don’t want you getting a big head about this, but it just happens sometimes. When I...”

Lexa trails off, not because she’s embarrassed to say the word, but because the change in Clarke’s face as it dawns on her is filling Lexa with all kinds of regret for saying anything at all.

“Orgasm,” Clarke fills in for her, one of those eyebrows inching up as she stares at Lexa. “You cry when you come?”

She’s more amused than concerned now, still keeping her distance at the foot of the bed but smirking, and Lexa isn’t sure which annoys her more.

“Shut up.”

“But, earlier, you didn’t…”

“It’s not every time,” Lexa shrugs, “Only when it’s—”

“So earth shattering that you tear up,” Clarke supplies, that smirk stretching by the second.

“Overwhelming,” Lexa corrects.

“Overwhelmingly good?”

She’s positively grinning as she says it, blue eyes lighting up with mischief and pride.

“Clarke,” Lexa groans, bending at the knees if only so Clarke won’t still be technically between her legs.

This is the big head she expected.

She presses her palms hard against her eyes, anything to force herself to look away from Clarke’s smarmy face.

“I knew I was good, but this is a first,” the blonde tells her.

“I hate you,” Lexa says, pulling a pillow over her face in mortification.

Warm fingers peel it away to toss it off the side of the bed, then push at Lexa’s knees until her legs are flat against the sheets. The bed shifts, and when Lexa opens her eyes, Clarke is leaning over her, still smug.

“I mean, I haven’t had any complaints, _obviously_ ,” Clarke rolls her eyes as though she’s offended herself by suggesting such a thing, “but I haven’t moved anyone to tears with my performance, either.”

“I can’t believe I did this,” Lexa huffs, shoving at Clarke’s shoulder gently, but insistently enough that she tips from her spot hovering over Lexa into the spot beside her.

Lexa tugs the bed sheet until it’s covering her from the chest down. Clarke barely reacts, doesn’t rush to cover her body or school the amusement on her face. She just props herself onto her side to keep teasing Lexa.

“Moved to disbelief,” the blonde says, “another first,” and she looks far too pleased with herself when she adds, “Believe it or not.”

“I _cannot_ believe I did this,” Lexa says again, more emphatically, because, of course, Clarke is the most infuriating of all the people she could’ve decided to bring home.

Even if the sex was decent.

“This was so stupid,” Lexa grumbles, crossing her arms.

Even if the sex was _slightly_ better than decent.

“Pretty damn stupid,” Clarke agrees, rolling onto her back with a sigh. “But, clearly, you enjoyed it.”

Better than decent might be an understatement.

“Whatever,” Lexa rolls her eyes. She’s sure that, “I’m not the only one.”

“My tear ducts didn’t spontaneously empty themselves or anything, but, yeah, I’ve done worse.”

Lexa reaches for another pillow to whack Clarke in the face.

“We both know that’s true,” she reminds her.

“Ass,” Clarke snorts out, the insult muffled in the pillow and her laughter.

She steals the pillow from Lexa’s hand again, this time tucking it under her head and staring at the ceiling. Lexa does the same, folding her hands under her head and willing her eyes not to stray. The temptation to look at Clarke’s chest eats at her, but she’s determined to ignore it.

They share a long silence that isn’t exactly companionable, but isn’t as tense as Lexa’s expecting, either.

Somewhere between pressing Clarke into that brick wall outside the bar and pressing her into the bed sheets that Clarke assumes Lexa spent way too much money on, the soft edges of her alcohol-addled mind sharpened. The buzz faded while she and Clarke were close enough that their shoulders brushed together during the taxi ride home and the smell of Clarke’s perfume was more intoxicating than the whiskey, or maybe later, when Lexa was fitting her key into her door and Clarke was rambling about bad decisions with her teeth tugging at the skin of Lexa’s neck.

Sobriety crept up on them, and, still, they wound up in this bed together, sweaty and in agreement about exactly three things: one, that they were doing something stupid; two, that they both enjoyed it; three, that Lincoln absolutely did not need to know, because he would make it a _thing_ , and it definitely wasn’t one.

And, now?

Now, Lexa stares up at the ceiling because she doesn’t know what comes next.

The heat of Clarke’s skin is too close, and her hair smells like coconuts, and Lexa won’t admit to Clarke, but that last orgasm might have scrambled her brain even harder than the two it followed.

It’s too soon, and even if it weren’t, Lexa can barely think with Clarke still in her bed.

And…

“You’d tell me right,” Clarke asks, interrupting Lexa’s train of thought without looking over. Lexa can’t hear that smugness anymore, even thinks she hears an edge of nerves creeping to the forefront. “If they weren’t good tears, or if I did anything wrong. You’d tell me?”

Lexa doesn’t quite know how to react to sincerity, to concern or trepidation, not when it’s coming from the most obnoxious person she knows.

“God, stop fishing, you egomaniac,” she says, trying to sound lighthearted, but, when she peeks over to see Clarke chewing on her lip, Lexa promises, “They were good tears.”

Clarke makes eye contact with her, a few long seconds that feel more intimate than anything they’ve done to each other since they made it into Lexa’s house.

Lexa can’t quite read the other woman’s face when she asks, “Good enough for one last round?”

“You just saw me cry and you still want to fuck me,” Lexa asks incredulously, because figuring out how to move forward with full knowledge that this was stupid and shouldn’t happen again is perplexing but figuring it out with full knowledge that it’s a mistake worth repeating feels impossible.

“You said they were good tears,” Clarke shrugs, then explains, “and I’ve spent years kind of hoping to make you cry. No offense.”

Lexa thinks she’s joking, but also, “That’s kind of understandable.”

She can’t say she’s never hoped to make some small dent in Clarke’s too-cool exterior, let alone find one.

“I didn’t know it’d be like this, but I can’t complain. It’s Pavlovian, I think,” the blonde says, “the tears should scare me off, but now that I know they’re a sign of a job well done, they’re kind of working for me.”

“Pretty sure that’s not how classical conditioning works,” Lexa says, leaning up on her elbows. “And, if you were trained in a certain response, wouldn’t that make you a dog?”

“I’m trying to proposition you,” Clarke reminds her, waving a hand down at her own body, “so, if you’re saying ‘no’, then you can just say it. You don’t have to call me a dog or bore me to death first.”

“You brought it up,” Lexa reminds her, and then she rolls her eyes again, because, no, she isn’t saying ‘no’—and the sex might be pretty damn good—but she also has to find a way to phrase it without giving Clarke’s ego any more ammunition.

“Should I be calling for a ride home,” Clarke asks, and the way she somehow forces her voice to be completely neutral, the way she easily sidesteps an argument about classical conditioning in favor of either continuing or stopping this _whatever_ they’re doing, annoys Lexa as much as it impresses her.

“Whatever, I’m already naked and you’re already here, so we might as well—”

Clarke is on top of Lexa in milliseconds, tugging the sheet from between them and only pausing long enough to say, “Let me know if you need a tissue or something.”

“This’ll never work if you don’t shut up,” Lexa tells her, tangling her fingers in messy blonde hair and pulling Clarke down to meet her lips before that infuriating mouth can start running again.

 

 

“This isn’t going to be weird, right,” Clarke asks. She tries for a smile, but isn’t sure it translates, since Lexa only looks over at her for a second.

It’s the first time she’s seen Lexa in a week. The first time they’ve been in the same place, fully clothed, since the late morning after their indiscretion.

Well, _indiscretions_ , technically.

The first time Clarke’s seen the other woman since slipping out her front door, embarking on the walk of shame with a criminally disgusting protein bar in hand and a string cheese trapped between her teeth.

Of course, Lexa couldn’t be bothered to keep real food in her town house, but Clarke had to begrudgingly admit that the other woman’s morning after etiquette wasn’t the worst she’d ever experienced. The brunette had even offered Clarke her choice of cranberry juice or green juice, and if either of them hadn’t turned her stomach, she might’ve sat at the breakfast bar across from Lexa and awkwardly accepted.

But, dressed in her outfit from the night before, and with aware of what Lexa looked like without clothes on, Clarke thought the proximity might make it impossible to stick to the whole _this was fun, but it shouldn’t happen again_ conversation she and Lexa had when they woke up.

“Why would it be weird,” Lexa asks, her voice even as ever.

There’s a bottle of wine in one of Clarke’s hands and a bottle of allegedly good Polish vodka that she’s been trying to pawn off on anyone who’ll drink it for months in the other, while a loaf of overpriced double-crust French bread and reusable grocery bag are practically cradled in Lexa’s.

Somehow, they managed to show up at Lincoln’s apartment within seconds of each other, Clarke stepping out of the elevator at the end of the hall to see an infuriatingly calm Lexa exiting the stairwell on the fourth floor. There wasn’t anywhere else to look as they walked toward Lincoln’s door, just a few long seconds of avoiding eye contact until they met in the middle and turned to look at the door.

Neither of them has knocked, yet.

“You’re right,” Clarke says, even if it physically pains her to direct those words at Lexa, “We don’t have to make this awkward.”

“It’s not,” Lexa says, “We’re just two people, here for a dinner party. Nothing weird.”

“Right,” Clarke says, “Just two individuals, arriving separately, at their mutual bestie’s home, after sleeping together.”

“Nothing has really changed,” Lexa tells her, “and it’s not like it’ll happen again.”

“Won’t happen again,” Clarke nods, “We’re in total agreement, so this doesn’t have to be weird.”

“You keep saying that like you think it’s going to be weird,” Lexa says in this oddly lilting voice, her eyes still trained on the door. 

“I’m just suggesting we act natural.”

“I don’t have to act, Clarke. Do you?”

When Clarke goes to glare at Lexa, the other woman meets her eyes, and she’s smirking, and Clarke’s whole brain short circuits for a second.

Clarke is supposed to be the casual one. She’s supposed to do the smirking and teasing while Lexa does the quietly overanalyzing thing. And, in Lexa’s bedroom, with the endorphins or oxytocin or whatever flowing, Clarke _was_ the cool one.

She could practically hear the gears turning in Lexa’s head and see her doing the mental gymnastics to make sense of the two of them coexisting peacefully for a few hours without any buffers. _Or clothes_.

A week after the fact, with plenty of time to think too hard, the roles have clearly reversed, and Clarke finds herself floundering.

“I’m just trying to make a game plan, here,” she says, fixing her eyes on the dark wood of the door, willing herself to brainstorm some strategy for reclaiming the upper hand.

“Don’t be weird, Clarke,” Lexa says smoothly, “that is the plan.”

“ _You_ don’t be weird,” Clarke huffs under her breath.

“Are you going to—” Lexa breaks off when Clarke taps the vodka bottle against the door a few times.

 

 

“You’re here,” Lincoln smiles, pulling his door wider to welcome his best friends, and then, “both here,” he observes, wondering how long Lexa and Clarke have been loitering outside his door, probably arguing over who brought the most important contribution to the meal they’re going to make together, “please tell me my neighbors aren’t going to show up complaining about you two tomorrow.”

“Fifty-fifty chance,” Lexa smirks, holding out her Whole Foods bag to Lincoln.

It’s heavy, practically straining against the produce and whatever else Lexa has crammed in there, despite Lincoln promising he had most of the important stuff covered.

“Why would your neighbors complain,” Clarke asks, as she shoulders in past Lexa and kisses Lincoln’s cheek, “I mean, that one,” she jerks a thumb at Lexa as she comes through the door and kisses Lincoln’s cheek, too, “reeks of garlic, but a hot blonde brightened up your hall for a short while.”

Lexa rolls her eyes so hard Lincoln almost tells her they’ll get stuck.

“Garlic barely has a smell until it’s been cut, but if you insist on pretending otherwise, I can’t really stop you,” Lexa says, heading into the kitchen.

It’s Clarke’s turn to roll her eyes next, and Lincoln knows she’s planning out whatever she’s going to say, so he interjects with, “This is good. Get it all out of your system before Octavia gets here and you two impress her with your civility.”

There’s a reason Lincoln told Octavia he’d handle dinner with Clarke and Lexa while Octavia and the friends she’s bringing along took care of dessert.

It’s not like he hasn’t prepared Octavia for meeting his two best friends at the same time—which is a completely different experience than meeting Lexa for two seconds or passing along a ‘hello’ from Clarke when Lincoln answers her call while they’re together—or even that he doesn’t think Octavia will be able to handle them if they’re snippy.

It’s just that Lincoln knows his best friends are easier to love when they’re not having a verbal cage match.

“There’s nothing to get out of my system,” Clarke argues, following Lexa into the kitchen.

“Civility is a tall order, Linc,” Lexa complains when Lincoln heaves her grocery bag onto the counter to unpack, “do you think she’ll be impressed by minimal blood shed?”

Lincoln expects his friends to love Octavia, because she’s hilarious and adventurous and there’s a fierceness to her that he thinks would serve her well in battle or something, but right now that fierceness is applied to the things and people she loves, people like Lincoln, and Lexa and Clarke are going to love that.

He knows it.

But he needs Octavia to love them, too.

She’s already cleared the low, but historically daunting, bar of accepting that his two best friends are women, but, as excited as he is about the potential of forever, he can’t be sure it’s right until he knows he’s found someone who doesn’t mind Lexa and Clarke tagging along for forever, too.

“No blood shed,” he counters, pulling out grated parmesan and garlic, “and I guess it’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be great,” Clarke tosses out over her shoulder while she slips the wine into the fridge, but then she almost fumbles her vodka bottle racing to add, “I mean, we’ll _all_ be great. It’ll be great.”

“I’m sure it will be,” Lincoln says, frowning when Lexa doesn’t comment on Clarke’s clumsiness. If anything, he swears Lexa smirks at Clarke’s back, just for a second, before she pushes forward from the counter to grab a cutting board.

It’s not what he’s expecting, but, then, Clarke almost dropping that expensive vodka her parents gifted her with isn’t something he’d expect either.

He doesn’t dwell on it, since she recovers quickly enough to grab the stuff he picked up from the fridge.

Instead, he asks a dangerous question that he thinks he already knows the answer to.

“So, who’s in charge of what?”

And, naturally, Clarke says, “I can do the main dish,” while Lexa says, “I’ll do the chicken,” and then they glare at each other before they both look expectantly at Lincoln.

“I’m…” Lincoln trails off, looks at Clarke and knows she’s the better cook, then at Lexa and knows she’s brought ingredients that are tailored to a certain recipe, and finishes, “going to roast those carrots.”

He reaches for the carrot bag beside Clarke and a baking sheet, then settles himself on the far counter, out of the way, and only gets between the girls when he needs to grab a paring knife and turn on the oven.

From the corner of his eye, he sees Lexa pull out her phone.

“I have a recipe,” she tells them absentmindedly, searching for it.

“It’s lemon chicken,” Clarke dismisses, crossing her arms, “pretty straightforward.”

“Grilled chicken breasts with lemon and thyme,” Lexa corrects, and the blonde gets close enough to look over Lexa’s shoulder. The brunette, of course, leans away so Clarke can’t see, “There’s broiling involved, so a responsible adult should probably handle it.”

“Maybe an adult who hasn’t ever let taco meat burn to a crisp because she was following the recipe so closely.”

Lincoln snorts thinking about that disaster.

“One time,” Lexa reminds them both, spinning on her heel to frown at Clarke, “one time, and I was trying to make sure it was thoroughly cooked.”

“Burned to a crisp,” Clarke emphasizes, “We can’t impress Octavia and her friends with unintentionally blackened chicken.”

“They wouldn’t get food poisoning, at least.”

In the time it’s taken Clarke and Lexa to debate the lemon and thyme chicken, Lincoln has pushed between them to wash the carrots, and coated them in oil and rosemary.

If he doesn’t stop them now, nobody’s making the chicken.

“Okay,” he tells them, “Lexa _did_ wreck that taco night,” and Lexa groans, “but Clarke has also made us try peanut butter cookies so dry I thought we’d choke on them,” and Clarke pouts at the reminder, “so, just call it in the air.”

He wipes his hand on a kitchen towel while they wait, then reaches into his pocket for the quarter.

 

 

Clarke wins the coin toss and gets to choose who does what.

She broils the chicken and patiently teaches Lincoln to make a simple spinach and artichoke dip, while Lexa makes bruschetta to go with the dip and tosses the salad.

There’s a strange moment, when Clarke is flipping the chicken in the broiler and Lexa is begrudgingly pulling out the salad tongs she brought from home, when Lincoln swears he hears Lexa mutter some joke about salad tossing, and it’s just sly enough and crude enough that he tells himself he won’t be sure he’s heard it at all until Clarke takes the bait and says something back. But she doesn’t. Clarke’s cheeks flush, and Lincoln doesn’t think it’s the heat of the kitchen, but she doesn’t say a word.

“You’re being weird,” Lincoln accuses, chopping veggies for the dip and eyeing Clarke.

“I’m not,” Clarke argues, sliding the pan of chicken back into position,

“She’s being weird,” Lincoln insists, looking over at Lexa and letting the knife pause against the cutting board, “isn’t she?”

Lexa’s eyes flicker toward Clarke, then back to settle on Lincoln. She smirks. “Yep. Very weird.”

“Why?”

“I’m not,” Clarke laughs awkwardly, and it only adds fuel to Lincoln’s suspicion.

The knock at the door stops Lincoln from harassing her into telling the truth, but he promises, “Don’t think this is the end. We will figure this out eventually.”

Like he always does when one of his friends has found something to be strange and secretive about, he looks to the other, this time to Lexa, and expects her to be looking back, practically foaming at the mouth at the chance to needle Clarke with some embarrassing secret.

He looks, like he always does, but Lexa isn’t looking back at him. She’s looking at Clarke, and she’s still smirking.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lincoln knows Clarke and Lexa far too well to be surprised by them. Right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how many chapters it will take, but I have an end in mind for this and we aren't there yet.
> 
> Happy reading!

“I think your brother hates me,” Lincoln whispers into Octavia’s ear when they’re stacking all the dinner plates they’ve cleared in the sink.

He’s met Bellamy once before, a meeting too short to make much of an impression, and Lincoln was hoping this time would be more conclusively good. Even with Lexa, Clarke, and Gina, who’s both Octavia’s best friend and Bellamy’s girlfriend, acting as buffers, Lincoln’s barely been able to get a word in without Bellamy cutting him off with rapid-fire questions and staring almost unblinkingly while he tries to answer.

Lincoln would be worried he’s a serial killer or something, all emotionless and monotone, but each time he looks over to talk to one of the girls, he’s normal.

Nice, even, with vocal inflections and respectful silence while they speak.

“No way,” Octavia tells him, turning her head to kiss his cheek when he settles his chin against the curve of her shoulder. “If anything, he thinks you’re too good to be true, so he’s trying to intimidate you into slipping up. It’s annoying, but usually harmless and very temporary.”

“You’re sure,” Lincoln asks, not thrilled by the prospect of Bellamy trying to shake him down in such a subtle way.

Not that he’s bragging, but, on the few occasions when he’s been asked to meet the families of girls he was dating, Lincoln has a great track record. He’s got a good handshake, he’s respectful, he’s a decent listener. Octavia’s brother is, so far, one of a very small group that didn’t love him from the first meeting. And one of the other two had huge confederate flags for curtains in his living room, so Lincoln doesn’t really count it as a loss.

“Trust me, if Bellamy didn’t like you, he’d just ignore you for an hour, stuff his face, then make up some shitty excuse to duck out after dessert.”

“That’s comforting, I guess,” Lincoln shrugs, wrapping his arms around Octavia’s waist and squeezing. He mumbles into her shoulder, “At least we can agree on dessert.”

Octavia turns in his hold, loops her arms around Lincoln’s neck, and kisses him. She does the thing he loves, where she squeezes the back of his neck with both hands, a quick but firm press to the tight muscles there, and then clasps her hands over the spot while he forces himself to relax his shoulders.

“He does the creepy, dead-eyed _I’ll-murder-you-if-you-hurt-my-sister_ thing, but he’s just trying to make you sweat. And, really, he’s totally whipped. Gina already loves you, so Bell will fall in line sooner or later, and when he does, he’ll most likely stop using that weird fake-deep voice that I swear I asked him not to use on you.”

Lincoln folds himself even more around her, pulls her as close as he can get her until everyone else has gone home.

“You asked him to shelve the murder voice for me,” he grins.

“It didn’t work,” she smiles back, “but I tried.”

“I love that you tried,” Lincoln admits.

“I love that you noticed the voice and still tried to be nice to my idiot big brother,” Octavia says, “I promise our mom’s a little nicer. Like, not as nice as Gina, but not as weird as Bell, either.”

“I can’t wait to meet her,” he says, which is an exaggeration, but only a small one at this point. Octavia’s already met Lincoln’s mother, and it went so well that he’s almost excited to fly halfway around the country with Octavia to meet hers.

Octavia looks up at Lincoln with those eyes he loves so much and this smile—the kind that she once told him makes her feel like a teenager, the kind that spreads so wide and uncontrollably that she has to bite the insides of her lips if she wants to contain it, the kind that makes him want to write down whatever he said just to repeat it word for word and unlock the same smile as soon as it’s gone away again—and it occurs to him, not for the first time, that he really hopes he gets to see this face every single day, for the rest of his life.

But he knows he has hoops to jump through, friends to entertain, a brother to soften up, a mother to meet, before he can go making any declarations.

“Maybe we should get back out there,” he says, tilting his head toward the archway, and loosening his grip around Octavia and letting his arms fall. “I’m being a terrible host.”

“One more minute,” she asks, letting him go only to pull his arms back into place around her waist, “they can keep themselves occupied for a little while longer.”

Lincoln expects her to kiss him, expects to feel her thumbs rubbing little circles right behind his ears, expects her to nip at his lips like she does sometimes when they’re blissfully alone.

There’s laughter in the living room, where their friends are nursing their drinks and getting to know each other, but Octavia doesn’t do any of those things.

Instead, her grin to goes all sly, higher on the left side of her mouth than the right, and her nose wrinkles slightly as she says, in an even quieter voice than she’s been using, 

“So…Clarke and Lexa…”

She trails off, and Lincoln’s genuinely confused.

“What about them,” he asks.

He’s thinks she likes them both, and they’ve been nothing but nice to everyone but each other, even if he hasn’t forgotten about Clarke’s weirdness, flashes of which stuck out to him all through dinner, and even if Lexa’s smirked more in one night than the entirety of freshman year.

“What’s their deal?”

“Their deal?”

“You know,” Octavia says, shrugging in his arms, “have they ever…” she trails off, makes this suggestive creaking noise and raises her eyebrows expectantly.

“Clarke and Lexa,” Lincoln snorts, careful to keep his voice to the same hushed tone Octavia’s set, “like, Lexa and Clarke? Blonde and brunette sitting on opposite sides of my living room right now?”

Octavia scoffs, “What? Like it’s that far-fetched?”

It would take more restraint than Lincoln has in his entire body not to laugh in her face, but he tries to keep the laughter quiet, too.

 _Clarke and Lexa_?

Clarke “I had to call my dad for help because I impulsively threw the instructions to my new laptop down the trash chute before I even knew it had Bluetooth capability, let alone how to sync it to my printer” Griffin and Lexa “I started doing the Duolingo course in Swedish because I wanted to be sure that I could assemble the Ikea furniture I planned to buy eventually without making any mistakes” Douglas?

Together? Romantically?

“Baby, those two are, and I say this with love,” Lincoln emphasizes, “they’re like oil and water,” but then he thinks better of it, and, “No, Clarke and Lexa are bleach and ammonia,” he amends, when Octavia smiles indulgently at him, “Can they be mixed? Yeah, technically. But will anyone in the immediate vicinity survive it? I don’t think so.”

“And they’ve never been together,” Octavia asks, still smiling, but furrowing her brow with what Lincoln thinks is the cutest, most misguided confusion, “No best frenemy hate sexing? Not even in college?”

“Seriously, O, they’d either tear each other limb from limb, or one would drive the other into leaving the state.” He’s amused, because it’s the first time anyone’s asked him, but he’s caught off-guard, too. Lexa and Clarke aren’t the leads in some opposites-attract comedy, and, if there was any chance they wanted to be, he’d have some inkling of it by now. Right? “What makes you ask that?”

“Just curious,” Octavia says, sort of cryptically when she wipes the traces of disbelief from her face and seems to shake off the idea, “they’re both ridiculously good-looking, eligible lady loving ladies. I figured it was worth asking.”

Her non-committal shrug is enough to leave Lincoln’s mind at ease.

All these years of friendship? Years of moderating their arguments and navigating their freeze outs and getting used to their relentless bickering? He’d know.

“Definitely worth asking,” he says, kissing her cheek, “But it’ll be a cold day in hell before those two can ever learn to get along.”

Octavia is brilliant, but Lincoln’s known Clarke and Lexa for far too long to be surprised by either of them.

He’s sure of it.

 

 

Lexa is pouring a splash of Clarke’s fancy vodka into Bellamy’s glass when Lincoln and Octavia finally leave the safety of the kitchen.

She’s smiling, leaning toward him from her chair, as animated as she gets in front of strangers—the two of them bonded over some historical reference that went over both Lincoln and Octavia’s heads, something that Clarke and Gina both groaned about when they brought it up. As far as Lincoln can tell, the two of them seem to have become fast friends, and he’s only a little envious.

He has nothing but time to wear Bellamy down with kindness, but it would’ve been nice to skip over the guy’s best attempt at a shakedown.

Octavia’s brother is on one end of the couch, Gina next to him, and Octavia drops right beside her best friend without either of them taking their eyes off Lexa. They’re both on the edge of their seats, caught up in whatever story has Lexa beaming and Clarke sinking further into the armchair opposite her and blushing furiously. Lincoln drops onto the arm of the couch beside Octavia and grins when she leans her back against him to look to Lexa.

“…So, we finally find Clarke, outside, ready to square up against this Sterling guy, and he’s absolutely towering over her, well over six-feet tall, while she’s wobbling like her bones are made of paper,” Lexa tells them, and Lincoln remembers this one, remembers being in the middle of a tippy cup winning streak when a guy in Lexa’s lab told them to go get Clarke, remembers the way Clarke jutted her chin up at the heavily intoxicated douchebag who held their school’s record for the 100-meter dash.

“She wasn’t wobbling like paper,” Lincoln objects, looking down at his guests, and then at Clarke as she rolls her eyes at Lexa and thanks him indignantly. She takes it back when he adds, “I’d say it was more jelly-like.”

That earns him a poke in the kneecap that he sees coming but doesn’t deflect.

“Anyway,” Lexa presses on, setting the vodka bottle on the coffee table so she can talk with her hands, “We find her and she’s as in his face as she can be—”

“Barely chest-height,” Lincoln laughs. He can feel Octavia’s laughter reverberate through her back and into his side even before she looks up at him.

“—And she’s trying to goad him, the poster boy of the track team, into racing her, on foot, in the middle of this party.”

“Hadn’t even met the guy,” Lincoln emphasizes.

All eyes move to Clarke, who clarifies, “I’d just met his ex-girlfriend a few minutes earlier in the line for the bathroom. I’d been waiting for ages, and, when the door finally opened, she ran right into me, still bawling her eyes out.”

“Clarke has some kind of radar for crying girls, I swear,” Lexa says, rolling her eyes, “at half the parties we went to in college, she’d either find one and get sucked into her story or become one.”

Lincoln watches Clarke cock her head to the side and narrow her eyes at Lexa from across the room and anticipates some petty remark about Lexa being callous or cold, but Clarke relaxes back into her seat and says, “I _have_ run into my fair share of crying girls,” shrugs, and then, “They’re just drawn to me, I guess.”

There’s something in the way she says it, maybe her inflection, or the way she settles into her chair, finally a little less stilted and stiff than she was when she arrived, that sticks out to Lincoln. He looks at Clarke, and Clarke looks at Lexa, and there’s a pause in the story Lincoln isn’t expecting.

When he turns to look at Lexa, he swears she’s a little flushed, and instinctively looks at the vodka bottle on the coffee table to mentally assess whether it’s from the alcohol.

“I’d be lying if I said I was never the crying girl at a party,” Gina admits, cutting in on the pause, “and the Clarke’s of the world listening without judging us for being a mess is a godsend.”

Clarke smiles, and it’s a little too-saccharine, probably because she considers it a one-up on Lexa, but Lexa doesn’t call her out. Lincoln supposes they’re both trying to be nice for his sake.

“Thank you,” Clarke says to Gina while looking again at Lexa, “at least _someone_ recognizes I was trying to be nice.”

“Nice,” Lexa repeats, “If you say so.”

“Wait,” Bellamy cuts in, “So how’d you go from comforting the crying girl to fighting with the track guy?”

“She told me she’d broken up with him the day before the party and, within twenty-four hours, he’d spread a nasty rumor to all his teammates, who were spreading it around to all their friends. It was bullshit, and I told her so, but she was drunk and crying, so I tried going through him instead.”

“Which didn’t work,” Octavia guesses.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Clarke admits, shrugging and offering Octavia a half-smile, “so I told him if I beat him in a race he’d have to apologize and admit he was a liar.”

“What,” Gina asks incredulously beside Bellamy, looking to Clarke, who nods, “he was a track star, though. And you…” Gina winces, trying not to offend Clarke with a truth they all know, “aren’t. There’s no way he agreed, right?”

Lexa pours a little more vodka into the glass Gina’s been holding while she answers for Clarke, “You’d think that, but you weren’t there to see Clarke poke him in the chest. She did this huffy little thing she does,” Lexa puts the bottle back on the table and tightens her face and clenches her fists to pantomime Clarke’s signature huff, only intensifying the pout when she hears Clarke’s _I don’t do that. I’ve never done that_.

“You kind of do,” Lincoln laughs, just feet away as she does it. He waves a hand at her face and tells her, “It’s what you’re doing right now.”

Octavia reaches past him from her spot on the couch to pat Clarke’s knee, placating her into relaxing her hands, but Lexa isn’t done.

“He was so pissed after the poke that he totally agreed,” she laughs.

“But you guys talked her out of it, right,” Bellamy asks, looking from Lexa to Lincoln and back quickly enough that he can’t pull up the dead-eyed lack of enthusiasm and shoot it Lincoln’s way, then to Clarke to add, “No way you’d beat a collegiate athlete, no offense.”

“We tried,” Lincoln grimaces.

“Not hard enough,” Clarke says with a hint of a smile, “they’ll never admit it, but I think they wanted me to race him.”

“I’m assuming this guy smoked you and gloated for the rest of the night,” Octavia says, because that would be the clearest outcome, but no.

“If only,” Clarke says, wrinkling her nose. She’s still sitting back in her chair and takes a second to glare at Lexa before she sighs, “I suppose, if we have to finish this story, I might as well tell it myself to protect my image from unreliable narrators.”

“Yeah right,” Lexa challenges, “Only two people in this room remember that entire night in detail, and you aren’t one of them.”

Lincoln almost instinctively reaches for the coin in his pocket, assumes Clarke and Lexa will make a big deal out of who gets to share this story that Clarke almost always calls off-limits for company, and never even gets to the end of without finding a way to sneak out of the room, when Clarke flips Lexa the bird, but Lexa just rolls her eyes and doesn’t even interrupt when Clarke goes on.

“Anyway,” Clarke drawls, “we hammer out the details: foot race down the street from where we were at the end of the sidewalk to this huge, ugly, red Hummer down the block—”

“They were in the grass, agreeing to cut through a few front yards,” Lexa corrects, looking to everyone who wasn’t there in turn, “because nobody trusted either of those drunkasses to dodge a car if it came, and it was a yellow Hummer, but go on.”

“—and we’re trash-talking each other, just trying to verbally clobber each other—”

“Clarke was, at least,” Lexa jumps in, “Sterling just kept calling her a dumb blonde.”

“And you didn’t jump in,” Bellamy asks Lincoln skeptically.

“You don’t know Drunk Clarke Griffin,” Lincoln tells him. Clarke would’ve been downright offended if Lincoln had put the guy in his place like he wanted to.

“She can handle herself,” Clarke promises.

“Nine times out of ten,” Lexa adds, and Lincoln would almost commend her on complimenting Clarke, except they’re sharing this story about an exception to that general rule.

“So,” Clarke continues, “we’re stretching before the race and drinking our last-minute drinks—”

“You guys let her drink even more,” Gina asks, and Lincoln can hear the amusement being colored by judgment, but Lexa stops her by subtly shaking her head.

“They did,” Clarke says pointedly.

“Unreliable narrator,” Lexa argues, looking to Lincoln for validation.

“We did the vodka straw trick,” he explains, “where you convince your idiot friend to drink water by dipping their straw in vodka first.”

“Brilliant, babe,” Octavia tells him, wrapping her hand around his forearm to squeeze.

Her brother still narrows his eyes at Lincoln, but he nods along when Gina tells them how smart they were.

“Fine,” Clarke pouts, “You guys tell it.”

And Lexa pounces on the opportunity from her chair, getting more animated with her hand movements.

“So, they’re trash talking and stretching, and I swear Clarke’s maybe two minutes away from just punching the guy, when one of the other guys outside starts vomiting.”

Lexa takes a sick delight in this part of the story, even if she doesn’t get to tell it outside of mini-reunions with other friends from their college years, but, if Clarke’s resigned to hand over the reigns for this one, Lincoln might as well cash in on a little quasi-embarrassment, too.

“Poor Clarke is a notorious sympathy puker,” Lincoln informs the group, leaning over and patting Clarke’s hand, “and I swear the kid was at least a few hundred feet away, completely in shadow, and we had barely even noticed him, but Clarke saw him from the corner of her eye and it was all over.”

“Oh no,” Gina says, sympathetic even as she laughs.

“It was the sound, I think,” Clarke groans, “The sound and then I saw him and just…lost it.”

“You just blew chunks, right in front of the guy,” Bellamy winces.

“Worse,” Lexa says leaning forward a little more, her smile so wide it’s almost unsettling, “Drunk Clarke puked all over his shoes.”

Octavia’s grin is morphed by disgust, but it doesn’t falter.

“I became a human geyser,” Clarke admits, “It was so bad.”

“At least you didn’t have to race him,” Gina tries.

“That would’ve been a disaster,” Octavia agrees.

Clarke looks at Lincoln, and Lincoln looks at Lexa, and Lexa almost vibrates with amusement, because, “Clarke _still_ wanted to race him.”

“There’s no way,” Bellamy trails off skeptically, looking at Clarke.

“I was trying to defend some girl’s honor,” Clarke says.

“It was kind of sweet,” Lincoln says, tilting his head fondly toward her, “even Drunk Clarke’s heart is always in the right place.”

“But Drunk Clarke was also still,” Lexa swings both hands from her mouth in a perfect arch and sticks her tongue out, but she’s careful not to make any gagging noises, because, even on a good day, Clarke is a wild card in her reactions, “and the guy was in a puddle of it. His shoes, his jeans. Soaked.”

“How did that not stop you,” Gina asks Clarke, “If anything, the sight of him would’ve wrecked me.”

“She kept holding up a hand,” Lexa tells them, her smile wide and tinged with amusement, “trying to make him pause until she could stop herself long enough to run.”

“How badly did it go,” Octavia asks, leaning away from Lincoln to look up at his face, “because I’m imagining the little girl from _The Exorcist_ , but in uncoordinated motion.”

Gina hums from Octavia’s other side, “Like, _Exorcist_ meets the first half of _Racing Stripes_.”

“Exactly,” Octavia says, smiling at her best friend, then looking back to Lincoln for confirmation.

Lincoln snorts, because, yeah, that’s exactly what he imagines would’ve happened if Clarke had been able to muster an off switch for her mouth.

It’s one of the grossest memories he has from college, filed under _that time when we were so young and dumb that Clarke almost definitely should’ve gotten alcohol poisoning_ , but, at least, Clarke never ended up finishing that race.

“Probably not that far from the truth,” Clarke starts, grinning from her seat, “but, somehow, I apparently won.”

What?

Lincoln splutters out a laugh so loud and forceful that all the eyes on the couch cut to him. He looks at Clarke, barely able to contain himself, wondering how, today, when she finally allowed this gem to be dragged out of the vault, she would try to rewrite its ending.

Clarke does a lot of things, she _is_ a lot of things, but Lincoln would be hard-pressed to find a time when she’s tried to paint herself as something she’s not.

And, Clarke? Clarke is not a person who drunkenly beat a track star in his own event.

“Unreliable narrator,” Lincoln calls out, putting Clarke on the spot. He looks at Lexa, and, not for the first time tonight, Lexa isn’t on the same page.

Where he expects her to call Clarke out for denying the part of the story she’s usually already rolled her eyes and walked out on, she’s quiet. Where he expects his friend to meet him with wide, incredulous eyes across the room, he finds her looking down, picking at her cuticles.

And, Lexa? She only picks at her cuticles when she’s got something to hide.

Octavia is squeezing his thigh, just above the knee while Lincoln tapers off the laugh that Lexa doesn’t echo, and Lincoln is struggling to make something add up in his head, but he can’t even begin to make sense of it.

Something is happening, has been happening all night, and Lincoln can’t quite grasp it.

Clarke, for her part, is looking at Lexa.

And, Lincoln notices, she’s as confused as he is.

“You told me I won,” Clarke says, tentative but not accusatory.

“Not in so many words,” Lexa says, finally finding her voice.

Octavia, Gina, and Bellamy all look from Clarke to Lexa and back.

“I asked if he lost, and you said he did,” Clarke says, and Lincoln doesn’t remember this conversation, doesn’t remember much of anything after he’d had to help Lexa sneak Clarke up to the girls’ floor in their dorm without an RA catching them, since it all paled in comparison to the night before.

“You’re obtuse when you’re hungover,” Lexa shrugs, and Lincoln remembers leaving, heading back to his own room when Clarke was out cold on the floor in Lexa’s room, “And he did lose. You just weren’t the one running.”

Lincoln can’t imagine why Lexa wouldn’t have made it known that, “Lexa ran in your place. I was holding your hair back, and Sterling was being a giant douche, so Lexa took him on and won.”

For years, Lincoln’s assumed Clarke hates sticking around for the end of this story because it would force her to acknowledge that Lexa succeeded where Clarke didn’t. It didn’t come up much, not on Clarke’s end at least, but a story that starts with the more irresponsible and embarrassing of her college drinking and ends with Lexa saving her ass shouldn’t have come up much in the years since they were those stupid kids.

This thing he doesn’t understand gets even more complicated in his head.

“You ran,” Clarke says again, in clear disbelief.

“He wanted a race. I gave him one.”

“You beat a track star,” Bellamy says, his eyes wide, “You outran a dude who went to school for being fast.”

“He was really drunk,” Lexa emphasizes modestly, “It was almost unfair.”

“He also didn’t know Lexa was the fastest in a co-ed soccer league. She could’ve played in school, if she wanted,” Lincoln tells them, refusing to let her lowball herself.

“I didn’t get any full rides, but I was pretty quick,” she admits.

“He apologized to me on campus,” Clarke says, and Lincoln doesn’t think the surprise has left her face yet. “He saw me by the library, and said he was sorry. I mean, it was a half-assed apology, but he did.”

“Those were the terms, Clarke. I think he apologized to his ex, too,” Lexa says, folding her hands together. “I’m sure his friends had something to do with that. He seemed pretty embarrassed.”

“So, you’re saying you defended Clarke’s honor,” Octavia asks, and Lexa groans and wrinkles her nose and then side-eyes Octavia like they’re old friends instead of new ones, and Lincoln loves it even if his brain is practically itching with _something_ just below the surface of his understanding.

“You’re a legend,” Gina tells her.

“A hero,” Bellamy agrees.

“I did it for that crying girl,” Lexa rolls her eyes, “I’m hardly a hero.”

Octavia and friends are all quick to disagree with her, but Clarke stays silent. She looks at Lexa like she’s still as confused as Lincoln feels.

“Anyway,” Lexa cuts them all off, her cheeks coloring under their attention as she reaches for the vodka bottle again, “that’s why Clarke can’t stand to sip this ridiculously smooth Polish vodka her parents gifted her.”

She wiggles the bottle a little, holds it out to each of their guests in turn to offer refills, while they absorb a story even Clarke apparently didn’t know the end of.

They all turn Lexa’s offer down, too engrossed to have drank much, so she tips a little more into her own glass and puts it down again before she goes quiet.

Octavia looks up at Lincoln again, and she’s doing the smirking thing that Lexa has finally stopped.

It’s like she knows something he doesn’t, like Octavia can see clearly into this situation and lay out everything Lincoln thinks is tangled into neat ropes of information.

He doesn’t know what she’s seeing, but Octavia is brilliant, Clarke and Lexa are full of surprises, and the only thing Lincoln’s really sure of is that he doesn’t know as much as he thought he did.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke and Lexa talk.

Lexa is in her pajamas when she hears the doorbell. It’s too early to sleep, so she’s sitting up with a book in bed and fighting the heaviness of her eyelids instead. She considers ignoring it altogether, figures anyone who really needs her will call, but then the bell sounds again, a little longer than the first time, so she sets her book aside and peels herself out of bed.

It’s been a long day. A day too full of cleaning up other people’s messes, just in time to keep them from spiraling, but too late to avoid sharing the brunt of her boss’ complaints about the job performance of employees he hired and trained. A day that seems to drag along slowly in every moment of tension and zoom past each moment of calm.

It doesn’t help that she’d woken up regretting all the vodka she’d shared at Lincoln’s dinner party the night before. The five of them had nearly finished off the bottle together, trading stories and laughing, while Clarke sipped her wine and listened, eerily quiet, for once.

The last thing Lexa really needs is some door-to-door cable guy talking her ear off, or the two little boys with the wide, expectant eyes from down the street trying to peddle more cookie dough even after she bought more than any single person should be able to eat in a year, or those polite, but too insistent, missionary women trying to goad her into discussing the bible on her front porch. She’ll check the peephole, she figures, and crawl back into bed at the first sign of someone she’d rather avoid.

It isn’t any of those people, though.

Not the salesperson or the little boys or the women in their floor-length skirts and backpacks.

She pulls the door open, frowning despite herself, not in disappointment or annoyance, but confusion.

“Clarke,” Lexa greets the blonde who seems almost as bewildered as Lexa is that she’s on her doorstep, “Can I help you?”

Lexa leans against the frame of the door, crosses her arms, watches Clarke look at her with an expression so much like the one she wore yesterday, when she realized Lexa had run in her place. It isn’t confusion, exactly. Not confusion or anger or even irritation. The look on Clarke’s face is one Lexa doesn’t think she’d seen before the dinner party, and it’s far easier to rule out what it isn’t than to settle on what it is.

She knows it isn’t a social call. Mostly because of Clarke’s face and the fact that Lexa still doesn’t think they count as friends, but also because they’ve already agreed that it would be downright idiotic to fall into bed together again.

Seconds pass, with Lexa studying Clarke and Clarke studying her right back, gathering her thoughts or _whatever_ she’s doing, and Lexa’s shared plenty of tense moments with Clarke, but this one feels different.

Finally, Clarke speaks, but she only says one word.

“Why?”

Lexa frowns back. “Why what, Clarke?”

“Why did you run in my place?”

Clarke crosses her arms, too. She mirrors Lexa’s pose without stepping any closer, without her toes so much as skimming the edge of Lexa’s welcome mat.

She’s feet away, at least two or three, but she still feels too close, all of a sudden. Lexa wants to shrink away from that face, even if she’s not sure why.

Even if she doesn’t have anything to hide.

“That guy was an asshole,” Lexa reminds her, “An ego like that doesn’t stop growing on its own. Someone needed to put him in his place.”

“Which I would’ve done,” Clarke says, and Lexa can hear an edge of combativeness clipping her words, but she’s already decided this isn’t a fight she wants to have.

The guy was out of line, and clearly thought being an athlete was a free pass to be an asshole and a loud mouth. Lexa knows how guys like him operate. She knows how to shame them into acting like decent human beings, too. That’s all it was.

“And you would have if you hadn’t started hurling everywhere, I know,” Lexa says, a little shortly. “Do we really have to drudge this up? It happened a million years ago.”

He was being a jerk, Clarke was clearly out of commission for the night, and Lexa had an impulse, a fleeting thought that dawned on her so suddenly and so insistently that Sterling was huffing and puffing and cursing well behind her before she’d even considered the why of it.

“I just don’t get why you wouldn’t tell me,” Clarke says, eyes narrow. She doesn’t look at Lexa as she says it. Instead, she seems to focus on some spot on the door frame, high on the side Lexa doesn’t have her back against. “Was it some long game? Did you laugh about my cluelessness? Or—”

Lexa flinches involuntarily, not liking how easily that accusation rolls off Clarke’s tongue.

“Why is everything such a fight with you,” Lexa asks, cutting Clarke off. The blonde scoffs at her and Lexa groans right back, loudly, because she’s wondered for years.

For almost a decade, she’s known Clarke, and, for just as long, they’ve been finding new ways to drive each other crazy. Lexa doesn’t even do it on purpose. Well, she doesn’t _always_ do it on purpose, and she doesn’t think Clarke does either. But, somehow, they end up at each other’s throats, just the same.

Lexa lifts herself from the door frame to stand squarely in front of Clarke, arms still crossed.

“I just want to know,” Clarke says. She shrugs, her shoulders shooting up quickly, and even when she stops shrugging, they seem to linger, just a little closer to her ears than usual. Her cheeks are sort of flushed, whether from the evening heat or the conversation or some misplaced embarrassment, Lexa has no idea. “I want to understand why you let me believe a lie for years.”

She didn’t hide any of this from Clarke to piss her off or to embarrass her or to mock her, she just…

“I don’t know,” Lexa admits, shrugging like Clarke had, “But who would I have even laughed behind your back with? Not Lincoln, obviously,” she says, thinking of the many, many times when Lincoln has defended one of them from the other, at even the faintest whiff of cattiness. But also, “It’s not like I was trying to trick you.”

Clarke sighs, and Lexa watches her take a deep breath, maybe to calm herself while she absorbs what Lexa’ saying.

“I don’t like feeling lied to,” Clarke says quietly, after she lets that deep breath out. She shifts her arms, so they're still crossed, but it seems less stand-offish. Less confrontational, more self-soothing. The way her hands wrap around her own arms, she looks like she’s just trying to hold herself together.

Her voice, the softness of it or the uncertainty, reminds Lexa of having Clarke in her bed, of recognizing a vulnerability that, in theory, she must’ve known existed, but never expected to see or hear.

It occurs to Lexa then that Clarke isn’t really angry, that her words aren’t clipped out of annoyance, and her shoulders aren’t tensed for a fight. She really thinks, has been convincing herself for the better part of a day, that Lexa’s had some multi-year-long diabolical plan, just to embarrass her in front of Lincoln’s girlfriend and her friends at some random dinner party. 

Clarke isn’t mad, she’s hurt.

And it’s a little insulting.

For better or for worse, whenever Lexa has seen an opportunity to embarrass the other woman, she’s waited to pull the trigger until Clarke could see it coming. Friends or not, they’ve always had at least that much respect for each other.

“Look,” Lexa says, because, even if she doesn’t like the assumption she thinks Clarke has made, that vulnerability is just as affecting as it was a week ago, “you drew your own conclusions in the morning—” Clarke opens her mouth to speak but Lexa steamrolls past her, “—and you were proud. Annoyingly so, maybe,” she adds, “but I didn’t have to take that from you. There was a race. And that macho man fuckboy lost. It didn’t matter in the morning who ran it. I wouldn’t…I didn’t hide that to hurt you. It just didn’t feel like it was worth gloating about.”

As she says it, Lexa realizes she means it.

All those years ago, with Clarke badgering her through a mid-morning hangover for details, the blonde had filled in the blanks in her memory on her own. She’d come up with a version of events to match the nod Lexa offered when she asked if Sterling lost, and she’d grinned from the floor before flopping back onto the pillow Lexa had thrown at her when she’d practically crawled out of the bathroom.

Clarke had been pale and dizzy, and Lexa decided she didn’t care about the credit. It had been as much of an impulse as taking on Sterling had been, letting Clarke believe she’d won. It was an impulse that told Lexa she could just allow Clarke to sink into quiet satisfaction instead of snatching it away, and it was easy as anything to give in just before rolling over and going back to sleep.

There’s another long look from Clarke, another stretch of Lexa watching Clarke watch her. Clarke’s eyes are wide and blue and intensely focused on Lexa’s. She lets her shoulders fall, lets go of the grip she has on her arms in the same movement, and sighs. Her throat bobs. She rocks up onto her toes, then back down to earth.

It’s only a second, a quick up and back down, with Clarke keeping the same distance, just shy of the welcome mat, but Lexa almost expects Clarke to lean toward her. Almost expects her to sail right back into cockiness, into kissing her way through whatever awkwardness remains between them.

Lexa watches Clarke’s throat bob again, and watches those eyes dart away, and then, “Thank you,” Clarke says quietly, “For not taking that from me.”

“Don’t mention it,” Lexa says, again unsure of how to react to this side of Clarke.

“I’ll see you around, Lexa,” Clarke tells her, spinning on her heel, walking away as quickly as she materialized at Lexa’s door.

Lexa shuffles back, far enough that she can swing the door shut, even gets her hand on the knob, but she doesn’t close it. She watches Clarke leave with this weird feeling settling in the pit of her stomach at the sight. Like she doesn’t want her to walk away just yet. Like she isn’t done yet.

Clarke’s halfway down the driveway when Lexa calls out to her. She doesn’t even know she’s going to do it until she hears her name leaving her lips. Lexa watches her stop, sees the breath she takes before she turns around without giving up an inch of the space she’s claimed.

That feeling in Lexa’s stomach doesn’t change. It doesn’t disappear. It just settles, incomprehensible and unwelcome.

She doesn’t know what to say, or why she spoke up at all. She doesn’t want to think about what it might mean that Clarke is the only near-constant factor in Lexa’s brief moments of impulsivity.

“You’re welcome,” Lexa says.

She says it instead of _I’m sorry_ because she isn’t. Instead of _let it go_ because she knows Clarke will have to do that on her own time. Instead of _come back_ because…why would she ask that?

She says it, and she offers up a tight smile that she isn’t sure Clarke can even see with sun almost below the horizon until the blonde returns it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke, Lexa, and an unexpected proposal

“You’re here early,” Lexa notes when she walks up to the booth where Clarke is waiting.

Lexa stands beside it, looking down at Clarke, at the empty space beside her and then the bench on the other side, without making any move to sit. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in two weeks, since Clarke showed up on Lexa’s door step. It’s also the first time they’ve spoken in the same amount of time.

“I’m early sometimes,” Clarke argues reflexively.

“You’re literally never early,” Lexa argues back, furrowing her brow.

She’s right, of course. Lexa is almost always the first to arrive. Lexa, who sometimes makes a contingency plan for her contingency plans. Lexa, who seems to budget time the way some people budget money.

Clarke, on the other hand, is almost always a few minutes late.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Clarke says, looking up to roll her eyes at Lexa where she still stands and quietly hoping this first will double as a last.

Clarke doesn’t mind showing up a few minutes late. In fact, she prefers fashionable lateness so much that she isn’t above lingering a little longer on whatever sidewalk her Lyft driver leaves her on or walking extra slowly toward wherever she’s meant to be. She takes pride in it, even. She likes that Lexa shows up first, likes that, most of the time, someone else has to make the small talk with the hosts, likes that she doesn’t have to fidget at an empty table alone and waiting, likes that she doesn’t have to turn up somewhere anxious about having mixed up a date or time.

Any other day, showing up a few minutes behind the agreed upon schedule takes away a lot of uncertainty for Clarke.

Today, Clarke’s seeing Lexa’s face for the first time in two weeks and for the first time since she all but ambushed her at her house. Even the idea of showing up late and not arriving until their whole group had arrived first couldn’t cut down on her uncertainty. They’re both about fifteen minutes earlier than they agreed to meet Lincoln and Octavia, and Clarke’s already been waiting for five.

Lexa seems to realize the same thing Clarke had when she was first led to the booth. If Lexa sits across from Clarke, then Lincoln and Octavia will have to split sides, too. If she sits beside her, they’ll be closer than they’ve been in weeks. Closer than they’ve been since they agreed on putting up a flimsy boundary line between them.

Lexa hums her acknowledgment instead of speaking again as she slips onto the seat beside Clarke, just inches away. She pulls off her crossbody purse, eyeing the space between her and Clarke, but, apparently deciding to tuck it beside her thigh on the open side of the booth.

There’s space between them, at least six inches of it, and Clarke can’t decide if it’s not enough or too much.

And then, she’s crossing it.

Instinctively, Clarke reaches a hand past Lexa’s body, a hand that startles the other woman out of staring resolutely ahead, to grab Lexa’s bag and move it to the other side of Clarke, just against the half-wall where Clarke’s bag sits.

Lexa frowns, but doesn’t speak.

“Do you want your bag to get knocked over,” Clarke asks, “or purse-snatched?”

“I doubt anyone’s going to snatch my purse in a comedy club, Clarke,” Lexa says, her mouth in a straight, incredulous line. “You’re being weird again.”

“I’m not,” Clarke starts, and then she rolls her eyes and snaps her mouth shut, because she absolutely is. She’s been thinking about this moment for days, even before Lincoln mentioned that Octavia had been asking him to take her to an open mic stand-up night ever since Clarke let it slip that Lincoln had done one way back in college on a dare; he insisted on inviting Clarke and Lexa along because he figured their embarrassing stories would be enough to convince Octavia his routine wasn’t worth a repeat performance. Instead, Clarke lets out a breath and looks straight ahead when she tries to convince them both that, “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Lexa says, but lets the word drag on and narrows her eyes at Clarke, making it clear she doesn’t believe her.

Clarke’s had days to ruminate on how she should go about this moment, and that isn’t counting the rest of this two weeks of, well, she isn’t even sure how to describe the loop her mind’s been stuck in since she saw Lexa last. There was something about her smile when Clarke was leaving, and there was something about the way she’d said _you’re welcome_ , and there was something about how she let Clarke accost her without losing her patience.

Clarke can’t seem to make sense of it.

And, after two weeks, a few days of which she spent intensely focused on brainstorming ways to exist in space with Lexa after freaking out on her, the best she came up with is, “I’m sorry,” which comes out in a rush, and then Clarke lets out a big breath and sort of deflates at the skepticism and confusion battling for control of Lexa’s face. Clarke looks ahead, just like Lexa had to scan for Lincoln and Octavia, but continues, “For showing up at your house like that. It wasn’t… I freaked out on you, so, I’m sorry.”

“It happens,” Lexa shrugs, and Clarke looks over just in time to make eye contact with her.

“Not to me,” Clarke admits. “Not usually.”

Lexa doesn’t say anything at first. She looks at Clarke long enough for the confusion to eclipse the skepticism, and longer still, until the confusion gives way to something Clarke doesn’t often get from Lexa. It looks a lot like understanding: a furrowed brow smoothing out; green eyes un-narrowing; the firm set of a downturned mouth softening. Then, “Why now?”

“You were right,” Clarke admits, cutting through every instinct to bail before she can put herself in another abnormally vulnerable position with Lexa. “I’m being weird.”

“Clearly,” Lexa agrees, shifting in the booth until she can look squarely at Clarke.

Clarke almost loses her nerve. It would be easier saying what she knows she needs to say if Lexa weren’t looking at her so intently.

“We had sex,” Clarke says, her voice lower than before. She knits her hands together in her lap.

“Yeah,” Lexa says, and then she’s smirking through bemusement and flushed cheeks to add, “I was there.”

“And we agreed it wouldn’t change anything,” Clarke prompts.

“And it didn’t,” Lexa says, but the way the words fall from her lips, a little higher after each, makes it feel like a question.

“But, then you were nice to me,” Clarke says, and she can’t help that her words sound like an accusation.

Lexa’s frown contorts and pulls to the side of her face when she tilts her head to consider it.

“Technically,” Lexa says coolly, “I was nice, what, almost ten years ago? That wasn’t the sex.”

But, Clarke doesn’t mean ten years ago. They’ve talked about that night, and she’s decided not to dwell on it. She means Lexa letting her freak out, letting her demand answers to a stupidly late question, and letting her rage on without slamming a door in her face. She means Lexa sending her off with a smile.

She doesn’t bother clarifying, not when Lexa’s being so annoyingly calm.

“How are you being so normal about this,” Clarke asks instead, accusation moving seamlessly into affront. “I’m good at things like this, the surprises and the casual sex and the putting things behind me after they happen. I’m _really_ good at it.”

“And I’m not?”

“You’re spontaneous and casual about as often as I’m on time,” Clarke informs her. “I’ve watched Lincoln talk you through at least five phases of overthinking before you would go on a blind date.”

“She could’ve been anyone,” Lexa argues, “an axe murderer or one of those people who constantly uses a baby voice.”

“Yeah,” Clarke snorts, “if not for the years she’d spent working with Lincoln, and all the anecdotes he had about how nice she was.”

“I don’t dive in headfirst as often as _some people_ ,” Lexa says pointedly, “but I don’t understand what—”

“Why aren’t _you_ being weird about this,” Clarke interrupts, gesturing between herself and Lexa.

“We said we wouldn’t be weird,” Lexa reminds her.

“Yeah, but why are you better at that than I am?”

“You’re really making this into a competition?”

“You would, too, if you were losing,” Clarke hisses.

“You’re always doing things without thinking, Clarke,” Lexa says, and the words come out so quickly that Clarke assumes Lexa’s had them ready for a while now.

“Without overthinking, you mean,” she clarifies, a little defensively.

“No,” Lexa says, shaking her head, “Without thinking. You move so fast you can’t talk yourself out of anything, which is ridiculous, by the way, but I’m not like that. You’re freaking out because now you have to do all the thinking you put off until this exact moment, but I already did mine.”

“When?”

“Pretty much as soon as you walked out my door,” Lexa says.

There’s something about this moment, too. Something about the way Lexa’s voice drops into something quietly serious, thoughtful, even. Something about the way she holds Clarke’s gaze up until the second the words are out, and then lets her eyes dart away. Something about how she tries to cap her seriousness with a noncommittal half-shrug. Something that leaves Clarke staring into the side of Lexa’s face for a few seconds while she tries to work out all these moments that don’t make sense.

Clarke doesn’t think she’ll understand anytime soon, and she hates the uncertainty.

One thing makes sense, though. Lexa was right about exactly one thing, even though Clarke is already internally bristling at the idea of admitting that to her: Clarke _does_ put off the thinking until she’s done with the doing. She hates uncertainty, and she knows she has to wade through it eventually, but Clarke would really prefer not having to deal with it quite yet.

An understanding evades her, but, as she looks at Lexa, Clarke gets an idea. It’s a terrible idea, probably. Gratifying for a short while, sure, but stunningly stupid in the long term. If there’s anything she’s good at, anything she’s far more comfortable with than Lexa is, it’s throwing caution to the wind.

“What if I don’t want to do my thinking, yet,” Clarke asks, not flinching away when Lexa’s eyes find their way back to her.

“I know I’ve made a handful of airhead blonde jokes at your expense over the years, but I don’t think even you can just shut off your brain at will,” Lexa quips, and Clarke can’t tell if she’s being intentionally obtuse or not, so she decides to be more direct.

“We had sex,” Clarke says again, “and,” she rolls her eyes, “ _like you said_ , I’m overthinking the after because I didn’t think during.”  
Clarke pauses, only for a second, then pushes forward when Lexa raises her eyebrows, still not sure where Clarke’s going with this, without interjecting.

“I’m suggesting we extend the _during_ ,” Clarke finishes, shrugging like Lexa had, but far more casually, as she watches the realization dawn on Lexa’s face. “No strings. No gross, squishy feelings. No being nice to each other. Exactly what we already did, just in an ongoing fashion.”

As quickly as the idea popped into her head, and as terrible as it is objectively, considering how she and Lexa usually relate to each other, she’s already invested in it.

“We’d kill each other,” Lexa argues.

“Ten years ago, maybe,” Clarke tells her, then rolls her eyes, yet again, and adds a more drawn out, “ _maybe_.”

But then, “It wouldn’t have crossed my mind ten years ago,” Lexa says.

And Clarke agrees. Ten years ago, thoughts like the ones they’re sharing now would’ve been nightmarish. Sure, she would’ve been blind not to think…but it wouldn’t have been worth it.

“It’s crossing your mind now, though,” Clarke says, arching an eyebrow almost involuntarily. She could almost swear the green in Lexa’s eyes goes a shade darker when the other woman just looks her up and down in response. “And we might not even kill each other.”

Lexa pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, looks at Clarke just a little more intently than she has all day, and Clarke is almost sure she’s going to agree when Lexa whips her head away from Clarke to spot Lincoln and Octavia making their way toward them.


	6. Chapter 6

“Do you want me to do the thing,” Lincoln asks, already scrunching his face into a snarl and straightening up in his seat. It’s been a while since he’s had to do it, but he’s always ready.

Clarke smiles at him and rolls her eyes as though she can’t imagine saying yes.

“The thing?” Octavia asks from his side.

“Whenever waiters seem too interested in one of the girls,” Lincoln explains, “I basically pull a Bellamy, minus the murder-voice. So, I give them one of these,” he tightens his face even further, draws his brows even tighter together, “and try to look extra imposing,” he pulls in a deep breath and puffs out his chest in a way that makes Octavia laugh at him, “and it scares off unwanted attention.”

“Almost always works like a charm,” Clarke admits from across the table, “but the optics are usually a little different.”

The waiter in question, _Finn_ , according to his nametag, has been by about ten times, which Lincoln thinks is overkill, especially since three of those visits meant him topping off Clarke’s barely touched water while ignoring everyone else, and two of them meant making corny jokes that Lincoln is convinced he practices on almost all the attractive girls he serves, and not leaving until Clarke had laughed. It’s bold of him, Lincoln thinks to himself, to offer up jokes to a pretty girl who’s here to watch much funnier people deliver their stand-up routines.

“Usually,” Lincoln says, “I get to pull the scary, strong boyfriend card. You know, throw an arm around them or hold a hand.”

“With both of them?” Octavia laughs out loud, and, if it were anyone else, Lincoln might feel like the butt of some joke, but, with her, he knows she’s honestly imagining how easily convinced strange men have been that he was capable of taking both his girlfriends out into the public sphere at once.

“Surprisingly,” Lexa quips, still sipping at her drink.

She’s been quiet for most of the evening, has been since Lincoln and Octavia settled in across from her and Clarke, but Lexa’s rarely the loudest in their group. Lincoln might think it was odd, but then this Finn guy has been hovering beside Lexa like a ghost trying to claim Clarke’s attention and Lincoln can smell his overpowering Axe body spray from the other side of the booth, so it’s probably ten times worse for her.

“I’m a little impressed,” Octavia admits, and Lincoln swear her eyes seem to sparkle with pride when she squeezes his knee and smiles up at him.

“I’m impressive,” he smirks, leaning down to kiss the corner of her mouth.

Lincoln hears Clarke playfully scoff, and he knows Lexa’s rolling her eyes at them, but neither of them tease him out loud when he lingers to leave a peck on Octavia’s cheek, too.

“Don’t let me stop you from doing the thing,” Octavia says quietly, her smile pulling to the corner of her mouth, “even if the optics are different.”

“Come on,” Lexa says, “The thing _has_ worked before, even with two of us, but there’s no way that Flynn guy will be dumb enough to fall for it with three women.”

“Won’t know until we try,” Lincoln smirks. They’ve fooled much more attentive guys before.

“And if he doesn’t believe Linc,” Octavia starts, patting Lincoln’s thigh, “you could probably just pretend to be Clarke’s very jealous girlfriend.”

The bark of laughter Lincoln lets out is loud enough that a few people at tables nearby turn to look at the guy who’s losing his shit before any comedians have even taken to the stage.

He laughs so hard his eyes water. So hard he doesn’t notice Clarke coughing around the straw in her drink, or Lexa flinching even further from the blonde, or Octavia narrowing her eyes at each of them in turn even as she laughs.

“He _really_ can’t be dumb enough to believe that,” Lexa says.

“Nobody’s that dumb,” Clarke scoffs.

“Won’t know until you try,” Octavia counters.

“Don’t do the thing,” Clarke finally says, “Nobody should do the thing. I’m sure he’ll get bored eventually.”

“You’re assuming he has anything better to do than to try to get your number,” Octavia laughs.

“Which is clearly untrue,” Lexa says.

“Let him try, then,” Clarke shrugs. She takes another sip of her cocktail, then follows it with a long swig of her water.

“You must not be having much luck with your Tinder squad,” Lincoln teases. He can practically sense Finn looking around the corner from his wait station, itching to come back with a pitcher of water.

“Don’t call them a squad,” Clarke groans, and then she looks at Octavia, who’s maybe the only one of them who might be convinced when she says, “They’re not a squad.”

“Squad sounds better than harem,” Lincoln notes.

“It’s not a harem, either,” Clarke says. She narrows her eyes at him, gives him the exact sort of tight-lipped smile he’s used to getting when she wants to pretend to be offended, then tosses a pretzel at him. Then, again for Octavia’s benefit, she says, “You’ve already made him forget what it was like to be single and mingling.”

“Just what I wanted,” Octavia laughs, snuggling into his side.

“Really, though,” Lincoln presses, “No frog princes or princesses out there? You’re honestly considering this Finn guy?”

“I didn’t say that,” Clarke says, suddenly coy.

“Come on,” Lincoln grins, “Give me something, here. At least Lexa told me about her almost-astronaut girl.”

“Raven,” Lexa reminds him. “And technically she’s still just working on aircrafts, not flying them.”

“Right, Raven—”

“Snake girl,” Clarke interrupts, wrinkling her nose, and Lincoln can’t say he’s expecting the confused little snort Clarke lets out, “You two are still a thing?”

“We were never a thing,” Lexa scoffs. “Stop trying to distract Lincoln from Finn the Axe body spray murderer.”

“Hold up,” Lincoln cuts in, eyeing Clarke suspiciously, “How do you know about that?”

Clarke rolls her eyes but isn’t in any hurry to explain, and Lincoln gets this weird feeling that’s he’s just slightly out of the loop.

Beside him, Octavia cocks her head to the side and, when neither of his besties speak up, she asks, “I thought you two weren’t,” she cuts her eyes toward Lincoln with an expression he can’t quite place, and then finishes with, “friendly.”

Lexa side-eyes Clarke so hard and with such immediate disdain that Lincoln can’t tell if he should reprimand her or thank her for reaffirming everything he knows about his two best friends with a single look. At least that hasn’t changed.

“Don’t be gross,” Clarke says, offended, “We’re not.”

“ _Someone_ stood us up for coffee recently,” Lexa reminds Lincoln, curt but amused enough that he knows he isn’t still in trouble with either of his friends, “and I had to settle for the nearest pair of presumably human ears.”

“Do we really want to talk about whose ears seem more humanoid,” Clarke says, and Lincoln flashes back to a completely sober but combative Clarke telling Lexa she had mouse ears once, “Because we can have that debate.”

Lexa rolls her eyes and emphasizes, “I clearly should’ve just kept my mouth shut.”

“I was the real victim in all this,” Clarke claims to Lincoln and Octavia. “She honestly wouldn’t shut up. I would’ve faked my own death if I’d had a few more hours to plan it.”

“This is so weird,” Lincoln admits, looking between them. At Clarke, whose arms are crossed tightly over her chest, and Lexa, whose jaw is set in annoyance.

“What,” Octavia smiles, leaning her chin on her palm as she looks at him fondly, “The two of them speaking to each other?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to make of it,” he says. He knows they aren’t friends. They _can’t_ be friends. If that were possible, they would’ve cracked years ago, when Lincoln was constantly trying to make them befriend each other.

“I haven’t gotten over the trauma of that one unsupervised conversation,” Lexa assures him, “so I doubt we’ll try again for another few years.”

“It was a dark day for both of us,” Clarke adds on, “and my ears would probably spontaneously bleed if it happened again.”

“Right,” Lincoln drawls, still studying both women. He wonders, if only for a few seconds, whether he’s missed something important.

Finn swings by, less than a minute later, to top off Clarke’s half-full water. Lexa’s glare sends him off with his tail between his legs before he can even deliver the punchline for his newest terrible joke, and Clarke barely reacts except to watch him walk away. Octavia tucks herself back into Lincoln’s side when she mutters a, “Told you,” under her breath, and Lincoln spends another few seconds wondering whether his girlfriend is talking to his friends across the table, or right to him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lexa takes Clarke home.

Lexa takes Clarke home.

She’s planning as much during the show, while comedian after comedian takes the stage, and while Finn the clearly thirsty server moons over Clarke. When the show is over, and the crackling mic is exchanged for a smooth R&B playlist, when Lincoln and Octavia are looking at each other like they can’t wait to get home, but offering up rides like they’re willing to pretend, Lexa dismisses them. Clarke doles out her hugs to them both, claims she’s running to the restroom before she calls herself a car, and Lexa knows, well, she expects, that the blonde is just putting on a show to keep them in the dark.

When Lincoln and Octavia head for the exit, Lexa walks toward where she last saw Clarke. And then, she almost doubts herself.

She spots Clarke before Clarke does her. Or rather, Lexa sees Clarke being chatted up by Finn. She watches him hand her something white and square and small, something she assumes has his phone number on it, and her face, without the consent of her better judgment, starts to contort into a scowl.

She doesn’t hold onto to it, though. She relaxes. Forces herself to unclench her jaw, to loosen the seam of her lip, to unfurl her brow. When she watches Finn turn away, watches him walk with a little pep in his step in her direction, back toward whatever job he should actually be taking care of, she wills herself not to glare.

It wouldn’t do to look like a jealous girlfriend. At least not anymore than she already has.

It helps that, even with something of a neutral expression, Finn blanches when he sees her face.

It helps that he barely nods and offers up a tight smile before hustling past her.

It helps that, feet away, she watches Clarke crumple that white paper as she makes her way over. Doubly so when they’re side-by-side, leaving the club, neither of them having spoken a word, and Clarke drops the paper into a trash can outside without even breaking her stride.

 

 

Lexa keeps her hands to herself in the Uber-ride home. She sits on the right side, climbs in after Clarke to leave a solid foot of space between them, and stares resolutely at the seat in front of her. She refuses to be distracted by the perfume she’s been smelling all night in the light, floral whiffs that broke up the onslaughts of whatever that waiter nearly drowned himself in. She makes the briefest small talk she can with their driver. She keeps her hands folded in her lap, her back straight. She’s given him five stars and a tip before they’ve made it up her driveway.

It’s with steady hands that she unlocks her front door, and with squared shoulders that she stops Clarke from absolutely mauling her as soon as it’s closed, and with a rapidly waning resolve that she tells Clarke they should lay down a few ground rules.

“You really want to talk about rules _now_?” Clarke asks, leaning against the door in exasperation. The way the moonlight hits her where it streams into the still-dark entryway, the way it lights up every bit of skin her dress doesn’t cover, almost has Lexa saying no.

“If not now, then when?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke snorts, looking her up and down, “in a couple hours, maybe. Or next week.”

“No strings,” Lexa prompts the other woman, reminding her of what she’d said at the club, and amending it to, “No strings, no feelings, right?”

“Fine,” Clarke says, rolling her eyes, “if you insist on doing this now, we will. None of that, and we’re not exclusive.”

Lexa watches Clarke cross her arms and arch an eyebrow, challenging her to accept the condition.

“Fine,” Lexa agrees, “No exclusivity, and neither of us gets weird about it.”

This time, it’s Lexa who raises an eyebrow in challenge, and it isn’t bright enough to tell whether Clarke’s blushing, but the way she shifts from one foot to another convinces Lexa she is.

“At the first sign of weirdness, either of us can call it off,” Clarke says resolutely, raising her chin. “Any other stipulations?”

“I’m sure I’ll come up with something,” Lexa admits.

She thinks on it for a few long seconds. She wracks her brain for one more thing, _anything_ , worth postponing the inevitable for. _The inevitable_ being dragging Clarke to her bedroom.

“Well?”

Well, nothing.

Lexa thinks of nothing. Nothing worth stretching the moments that separate where she is now from having her hands all over Clarke. Nothing that can cut through a mind made cloudy with invasive bits of memory and want.

But Lexa won’t say that. Not in so many words. And, even here, even with Clarke having ridden across town with her just to be told to wait barely inside the door, Lexa won’t give Clarke the satisfaction of hearing her admit how eager she is.

“I suppose I’m willing to table this,” Lexa says instead, her voice cool, “at least until later. If you are.”

Clarke doesn’t seem to share Lexa’s reticence about seeming eager.

Lexa’s words drop quietly into the room, settle for about a millisecond, and then Clarke is reaching across the space between them to hook her fingers into the neckline of Lexa’s dress and tugging hard enough that Lexa’s rocking into her before her brain can process the annoyance she’ll feel to find it stretched out later.

It’s hard to feel annoyance when, almost instantly, all that Lexa can feel is Clarke pressed against her. Clarke’s hips, Clarke’s belly, Clarke’s chest. All solid and soft and, thanks to a tall pair of heels, lined up perfectly with Lexa’s. Clarke’s hands—one releasing her neckline to dig gently into Lexa’s hip, the other settling high on her chest, over her collarbone—both dragging along as much of Lexa as Clarke can touch on the way. And Clarke’s eyes, roaming her face, never settling anywhere for long before she’s looking at Lexa’s mouth again.

Clarke leans in and Lexa’s eyes slip closed before they even make contact.

Eagerness be damned.

She feels Clarke’s breathy laugh hit her lips more than she hears it, and then, “Yeah,” Clarke says, “I’m fine with tabling it.”

And then Lexa can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand feeling the ghost of Clarke’s words when she could be tasting her lips instead, so she snakes a hand around Clarke’s neck to pull her in.

That first touch, the stickiness of nude lipstick and the softness of parted lips and the hint of a quick tongue, is good, but it isn’t even close to being enough. She’s been thinking about dragging Clarke back to her bed, and she’s sure she will before she sends the blonde home, but, for now, Lexa drops the hand on Clarke’s neck to her sternum and presses until the other woman gets the hint and backs up against the door. For every step Clarke takes, Lexa matches her, follows her, and only stops when she’s a little closer than before, her mouth still working against Clarke’s and their bodies impossibly close.

Clarke moves her hand from Lexa’s collar bone down to her breast, but then she’s pulling her mouth just out of reach before Lexa’s moan can even escape her throat. She’s sure she still has a dumb, kiss-struck expression on her face, but when she opens her eyes and sees Clarke smirking at her, mid-squeeze, Lexa tries schooling her face into the type of look she’d directed at Finn earlier.

“What?” If Clarke can hear the impatience in the word, if she can feel it in the way Lexa’s fingers still against her skin, she doesn’t let on.

“We’re in your entryway,” Clarke points out.

“I’m aware,” Lexa says, again impatient.

“Where there are windows,” Clarke adds, this time smirking even harder.

Lexa starts to retract the hand that was skimming just under the hem of the blonde’s dress. “So?”

“Is this the most spontaneous sexual thing you’ve ever done?” The hand at Lexa’s hip tightens in time with the one at her breast when she frowns.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Lexa rolls her eyes, “I’m not an absolute prude.”

“Sure,” Clarke drawls, but Lexa’s heard that inflection enough times to know it isn’t sincere.

“Clarke,” Lexa says warningly, moving both her hands to the outside of the blonde’s thighs and nudging her knee slowly between them until Clarke is gasping and stumbling to part her feet without toppling in her heels, “Shut up before you ruin this for me.”

The sigh and the quiet _whatever_ that Clarke rasps out reverberate from the tendons in her throat through Lexa’s lips when she leans in to put her mouth there.

Lexa swallows the instinct to inform Clarke that it isn’t easy to see through the mottled glass on either side of her door. They probably would’ve ended up here even if it was clear and pristine. Either way, she won’t give the other woman the satisfaction.

She gets about thirty seconds of blissful quiet before the other woman speaks up again.

“Don’t leave any marks,” Clarke says breathily, both hands in Lexa’s hair now, and Lexa’s teeth sink gently into the same place she’s been kissing. “I’m not wearing scarves in June like one of those pretentious art wannabes.”

“I’m not a teenager,” Lexa says indignantly, pausing to sooth the spot with her tongue, “If I leave a mark on you, it’ll be intentional.” She rolls her eyes even though they’re still level with Clarke’s throat, then notes, “And it’s not like pretentious art wannabe is a huge departure from your usual look.”

“Right,” Clarke says, dragging the word out, and Lexa almost falls over at the idea of the blonde just agreeing with her, but then she finishes with, “We _really_ might kill each other if you don’t shut up.”

“You first,” Lexa tells her, half-sure they’re going to get into some immature verbal scuffle before either of them gives in, but Clarke surprises her by tugging her up from her neck and kissing her so hard that neither of them has anything more to say.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been writing a bunch of other scenes that happen elsewhere in the timeline for these characters, and was riding so high until I had this shocking realization that, if I'm in charge of writing this story I have to actually physically write all the parts and not just the far off stuff that feels like an exciting pay-off after carefully laid groundwork (that i should be laying down right now).
> 
> Several stories in and i'm still surprised each time.

Clarke wishes she were wearing a watch. She rarely wears one, doesn’t like the way it feels almost always inescapably heavy around her wrist, the way it either highlights the scar from the time she broke her right hand or drags against every paper she writes on when she wears it on her left. She almost never wears a watch, unless she counts the Fitbit HR her parents got her, and that one she only breaks out on the days when she goes to the gym for cardio and wants something more than a sweat-soaked t-shirt and dry mouth to show for it.

She never really wears a watch, but, god, Clarke wishes she had one on right now.

A watch on her wrist would allow Clarke to check how much more time she has to invest in this flop of a date before she can make a polite exit. On any other bad date, Clarke thinks she’d be fine checking her phone, even firing off a text to Lincoln or one of her other friends to call her with some elaborate emergency that only she can solve, but she can’t make herself do it tonight. This date is awful, the guy is teetering dangerously between a snob and a cretin at any given moment, and Clarke is absolutely ready to go.

But she’s also petty. And, out of sheer pettiness, she refuses to check her phone like he has been periodically since they shook hands outside the restaurant. His Battlefront game has been sending out update notifications all day, he told her, as though she knew what that was or meant or mattered. Clarke needs the carrot of a vague feeling of superiority over this one terrible guy just to survive the stick that is this date.

She isn’t surprised. Plenty of Clarke’s dates have gone awry. When she sums it up for the friends that she’s made at her part-time art therapy gig, she calls her track record fifty-fifty. She doesn’t go into detail explaining that it isn’t exactly fifty percent good and fifty percent bad. It’s actually more like forty percent _fine enough that she doesn’t mind sharing a cab ride home and maybe one-kiss-no-tongue before she comes to her senses and unmatches them_ versus fifty percent _bad enough that she’s debating changing her phone number and/or moving before menus are off the table_ with a ten percent chance of _good enough to go out again_.

Tonight’s date, Jasper from Tinder, is really elevating the rest of that fifty percent.

Jasper, who calls himself an IT specialist even though he only works part-time behind a cash register at Best Buy. And that’s only when he isn’t in his mother’s basement creating Red Dead cheat codes to sell to twelve-year-olds and pirating Marvel movies. Clarke thought he seemed nice enough in the app, if a bit of a know-it-all. His pictures were interesting, and just a little off-kilter, and he had pitch-perfect GIFs at all the right moments for their limited conversation and plenty of memes that kept her laughing.

Then, she met him.

Clarke might not have been so grossed out by Liam’s open-mouthed chewing or annoyed by Murphy’s insistence on being called by his last name like they were high school football teammates or rolled her eyes as hard when Jenna dropped her fourth _isn’t that ironic?_ of the night if she’d known Jasper would follow them. Okay, so she still would’ve, but at least she would’ve known then to be grateful for the sort of painlessly obvious incompatibility that announces itself when sitting across from people like them. They certainly had their quirks, but one of them got near the loathing scratching at the back of her brain whenever Jasper opens his mouth.

Clarke swears she could sense the exact moment when Jasper decided he was smarter than her. She guesses he came in with a hunch, that he put on his wrinkled black button down and pulled on his skinny jeans and gelled his hair, then looked himself in the mirror before he left his house and said something like, _I, Jasper, God’s gift to women, am about to bless this poor, blonde bimbo with my tech jargon_.

She guesses he was already convinced of this, but that he got extra comfortable in his conviction when she pronounced GIF with a hard G sound, and Jasper got to “well, actually” her with a long version of the short story about the man who created GIFs insisting on a soft G. It’s a story she’s heard before. She even considers it sometimes before she reminds herself that the hard G just sounds better.

That wasn’t long ago, maybe ten or twenty minutes, though Clarke doesn’t have the exact time, and they hadn’t even been seated at a table, yet. Since then, she’s been mentally berating herself. She can’t tell if it’s been ten minutes or six hard years, can’t see the ticking of a little hand that proves she hasn’t slipped into some sci-fi reality where time doesn’t exist in any linear fashion, but she’ll be damned if she goes on another date with a man without a watch on her wrist.

“So, Clarke,” Jasper starts, looking at his menu, and Clarke grimaces because she hates the way he says her name—like he deserves a prize just for remembering it—but she hums in acknowledgment just the same, “What are you thinking? Perhaps a nice tilapia fillet?”

Clarke didn’t know she hated the word ‘perhaps’, but she files that away in the same place where she keeps her lessons about wearing a watch on dates.

She clears her throat, looks down at her menu again, then says, “ _Perhaps_ , I might order the creamy Tuscan garlic chicken. It looks good.”

“You don’t know how much of a relief it is to finally be out with a girl who doesn’t eat like a bird,” he says.

Clarke’s hands tighten around her menu at the backhanded compliment. She feels his eyes on her, hears the appraisal in his voice and clenches her jaw.

“They’re all eating twigs and berries, thinking that’s what real men want,” he scoffs. “I couldn’t tell you how many of them would probably faint at the idea of that cream sauce.”

“Somehow I don’t think _all_ women are changing their eating to impress guys,” she says, flipping to a different page.

“You might be surprised,” he says, and Clarke knows he doesn’t care whether she responds or not.

When the waiter comes back to the table for their order, Jasper’s in the middle of telling Clarke some unsolicited story about a Youtuber on an all-meat diet, and she can’t tell if he’s mocking it or envious of the other man’s brazen stupidity. The waiter is too much of a professional to react to the words flying out of Jasper’s mouth, but Clarke knows he catches the looks of bewilderment on her face, and she swears he shoots her a look of sympathy when Jasper finally shuts up to let them order.

“I’ll have the Caesar salad,” Clarke says after Jasper’s requested a steak. She hands off the menu to the waiter with a resigned smile, “Thanks.”

“Bird,” Jasper says quietly, in what Clarke thinks might be a playful tone with anyone who didn’t already hate him, then he smirks, and Clarke gets that little bit closer to the limits of both her pettiness and her politeness.

The salad is a tactical move. It’s a light enough dinner to offset the massive amount of ice cream she’s digging into as soon as she’s home—and she doesn’t need a light dinner to avoid the extra calories, just so she has enough room for every bit left in that carton of peanut butter fudge that’s stashed in the back of her freezer for PMS and other emergencies. She also knows she can finish it in a tight ten minutes, down the rest of her wine, then hit the ground running before Jasper can do something stupid like try to kiss her.

She thinks the waiter is taking pity on her—not doting or flirting like that Finn guy a few weeks ago, but still painfully aware of her suffering while Jasper dictates his defense of Elon Musk as his personal hero—because he brings Clarke’s salad out in just a few minutes with a watered down apology to Jasper about how his steak is only just being worked on.

It’s a head start, and she won’t waste it, so she lets Jasper quietly gripe about the service while she stuffs her face. By the time his steak comes out, she’s down to croutons and over the idea of not checking her phone.

Forty-three minutes of her time seems downright generous, especially considering she’d been on time and he’d been a few minutes late, and Clarke’s skin is in a constant crawl, so she finally sends off the rescue request— _On worst date of my life. Call ASAP pretty please_ —to the last number she texted and turns her ringer on while she waits.

And, like the work of a clock she can’t physically see, her phone rings.

And the timing is so impeccable that Clarke is half-mumbling an unconvincing sorry to Jasper and tapping the answer button before her brain can even question why Lincoln’s picture isn’t filling half her screen.

“Everything okay?” Clarke asks, and then tries to contain her excitement for whatever wild story Lincoln’s probably been working on all night.

“You begged me to call you,” is the response she gets. The voice sounds flat and high-pitched and maybe the littlest bit annoyed, and it’s definitely not Lincoln’s.

The voice belongs to Lexa. Clarke’s most recent texts were with her, because they can do that now, just text each other over on an otherwise uneventful night and send each other off a couple hours later without either of them thinking herself into a migraine. So, of course, it’s Lexa’s voice on her phone. And, of course, she’s not giving Clarke much to work with.

“Oh no, is she okay?” Clarke improvises. As much as she’d love to simply detail to Jasper the many ways in which he sucks, she’d rather not give him any ammunition to start a Reddit forum over her.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Lexa asks absently. Clarke can hear her typing on her laptop over the line. “No…let me guess, they’re incapable of speaking in complete sentences?”

“Of course, Mom,” Clarke says, really trying to sell a hint of shock in her voice as she tosses the napkin from her lap onto the table. “I can be right over.”

She shoulders on her purse, takes one last long sip of wine, and scoots back in her chair. 

Lexa hums, then asks, “Did that suffice? Or do you need a detailed account of exactly how broken grandma’s hip is, too?”

“Goodbye,” Clarke says, a little sharply, and then more softly when she remembers Jasper’s eyes on her, “On my way.”

Lexa disconnects the call as soon as she says goodbye.

“You’re going?” Jasper asks, half rising from his seat when Clarke stands from hers.

“Family emergency,” Clarke says vaguely.

“Should I walk you out?”

“I know the way, thanks,” she says, grimacing at the smear of ketchup on the corner of his mouth.

“But I figured, you know,” he wags his eyebrows at her, “End of the night, and all.”

Clarke should just turn and go, then block him on Tinder and wash her hands of the whole thing, but she hears the expectation in his tone and in the way his words trail off, and damn near snaps.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“C’mon,” he laughs, “This is a nice restaurant, we’ve had a good time, and I’m footing the bill. I was hoping it would earn me a goodnight kiss, _at least_.”

Clarke takes in a sharp breath, and, for a second, she’s so mad, so filled up with anger that it’s like she can see herself staring down this man who, when he was theorizing about how much smarter he was than she is was also probably expecting it would be much easier to scheme his way under her dress. Her face flushes with the exact sort of rage that her mother, and sometimes Lincoln, would try to talk her out of expressing in public.

But they’re not here, and Jasper’s the worst, so Clarke thinks, fuck it.

“Okay,” she drawls, clearing her throat and rolling her neck, “from the moment your creepily moist hand gripped on to mine, you’ve been the most self-obsessed, deluded, faux intellectual I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. All-meat diets lead to malnutrition, _Parks and Rec_ is not inferior to _The Office_ just because it isn’t mean-spirited, and the women you’ve been going out with probably don’t eat like birds because they’re worried about whether you’ll want to fuck them. They probably, just like I did, hear the things you say about women and how you don’t really think black people existed in the Disney version of 18th century France and then realize they can down an entire salad in half the time it would take to eat a gravy-smothered steak, which means spending half as much time with you.”

Her phone chimes mid-rant, but Jasper is in stunned silence along with half of the population of this restaurant she’s probably going to be banned from, and Clarke’s on such a roll that she can’t fathom stopping for anyone.

“I am not stupid,” she says, moving her line of sight only long enough to see her waiter wide-eyed over Jasper’s shoulder, “and I’m not going to let a guy whose mommy probably still starches his tighty-whiteys neg me into bed. Get that glob of ketchup off your face and don’t ever contact me again.”

The relief of saying everything out loud almost makes her lightheaded.

Clarke pushes in her chair as calmly as she can with shaking hands, and leaves Jasper wiping dumbly at his mouth at the table. She hears him call her a bitch but doesn’t think it’s worth another second of looking at him.

She thanks her waiter on the way out, fishing in her purse for a twenty to cover her meal and a generous tip. If she’s banned, nobody tells Clarke, though she can see people from the kitchen staff have leaned out of a swinging door to get a look at her, and there’s a huffy-looking bald manager who hovers in the dining room to make sure she leaves. The host who’d seated them looks like she’s still in high school but offers to call her a cab if she needs one.

She turns the kid down and leaves the restaurant with her head held high and a notification waiting on her phone. Again, it’s Lexa, but this time, a text: _Are you really coming over, or what?_

When Clarke orders her Lyft, she sets Lexa’s address as the destination, because they can do that now, and because, even at her worst, at least Lexa doesn’t waste Clarke’s time.

The ice cream can wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anyone asks, I don't even have opinions on Jasper in canon, his name was just the first to pop into my head and isn't that far off from the main inspiration for this character. He wears an ascot like a goddamn pickup artist wannabe.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke stops by Lexa's after her awful date.

Lexa’s still pecking at her keyboard when Clarke rings the doorbell. Once, at first, a long tone to let Lexa know she’s arrived, and then a second time, shorter, in case Lexa’s forgotten how impatient she is. The blonde half-stomps across the welcome mat when Lexa opens the door.

“Hang on,” Lexa says, in lieu of a greeting while Clarke kicks off her heels in the entryway. Lexa gets back into her spot on the couch, pulls her laptop back onto her thighs.

She sees Clarke meander into the kitchen from the corner of her eye while she sifts through emails and goes over her calendar, hears her pull down a glass and then run the tap even though she knows Lexa has a pitcher of filtered water in the fridge, doesn’t waste her breath reminding the blonde, who’ll just roll her eyes and claim that filtered water is a hallmark of Lexa’s snobbery or whatever.

Clarke must drain the water in record time, because Lexa’s hearing the tap again before she can even decide which programs to close and which to keep minimized until morning. After that, Clarke comes back into the living room, somehow even huffier than she was when Lexa dodged her mouth before she could even get the front door shut.

“I didn’t realize you were just inviting me over to watch you do…whatever all this is,” Clarke says, waving a hand at the stacks of paper lining most of Lexa’s coffee table. She takes another gulp of her water and Lexa notices how ruddy her cheeks are. She doesn’t ask if it’s the heat of the evening or some byproduct of her bad date.

She leans heavily against the arm of Lexa’s couch with her glass and Lexa’s hands freeze over the keyboard because Clarke knows that Lexa hates when she does that. When Lexa shoots her sharp a look, Clarke rolls her eyes and sinks onto the cushion instead. Lexa wonders if it’s a feat of her restraint or just some of that huffiness keeping her a full cushion away, instead of almost uncomfortably close and trying to tempt Lexa out of leaving her on hold.

Clarke is a lot of things, Lexa knows. Patient isn’t one of them.

“New student enrollment paperwork,” Lexa mumbles vaguely, cutting her number of tabs open in half, and then waiting until her screen goes into hibernation mode to shut it. She knows Clarke won’t ask for any details. Neither of them ever needs to spend much time explaining to the other what they do for work. “And you invited yourself over.”

“Did I?” Clarke challenges. Lexa moves her laptop back into the precariously open space among the papers and turns her head in time to watch the other woman raise an eyebrow.

“You said you’d be right over,” Lexa shrugs.

“Yeah, but I would’ve said almost anything to get out of that restaurant.”

“And yet,” Lexa says, angling her body toward Clarke even as she remains still firmly on her side of the couch, “here you are.”

“You saying you want me to go?” Clarke asks, one hand a little too tight around her glass, so Lexa can see the way her hands go a little white at the knuckles. The flush in her cheeks has spread to her throat, to the skin above her collarbones that’s exposed by her dress.

Huffy might not be the word. Now, Lexa thinks, Clarke’s pissed.

And Lexa doesn’t think it has anything to do with her. She doesn’t really see how it could. Sure, usually there isn’t this lull between the moment one of them arrives on the other’s doorstep and the moment when they’re dragging each other into the bedroom—near-instant gratification might just be one of a very small pool of things they can agree on—but even when there is, it sort of feels like a game. When Lexa makes Clarke wait, to kiss her or to touch her, Clarke just smirks and threatens to take care of herself instead.

Now, Lexa can almost feel anger coming off Clarke in waves, _has_ felt it since she walked in the door.

The blonde sighs. She rises from the couch mumbling something to herself about ice cream and batteries. She makes a show of pulling one of the coasters Lexa keeps in the drawer on the side of the table out and placing it in a sliver of space on the surface, then sits the glass on it with a dull thud. She barely looks at Lexa when she says, “I’m gonna go.”

Lexa watches her turn away, watches Clarke get about as far as the edge of the living room before she stops her.

“C’mere, Clarke,” Lexa says firmly.

She watches Clarke’s shoulders drop where she stands, then waits about two seconds for Clarke to spin on her heel and advance on her. Clarke climbs into Lexa’s lap and kisses her so hard that Lexa’s head hits the back of her couch. She’s so warm, her mouth pressed to Lexa’s and her bare thighs where they settle against thin leggings and her hands that start out framing Lexa’s face but then can’t seem to stop moving.

Lexa lets Clarke set the pace. She lets her drag Lexa’s hands where she wants, to her thighs, just above the knees. Waits until Clarke’s fingers coax Lexa’s into squeezing, then drag even higher. She doesn’t resist when Clarke’s hands pull each of hers up, under the hem of Clarke’s dress to squeeze her hips. Lexa lets Clarke squirm in her lap even though she hasn’t even _really_ touched her yet.

Lexa thinks she knows, at least vaguely, where all this is heading when Clarke mounts her on the couch, and she wouldn’t have texted if she wasn’t into it. She thinks she knows, but then Clarke becomes even more restless in her lap, and it shows Lexa that maybe she doesn’t.

It’s, well, weird is the wrong word, because Lexa and Clarke have both agreed that _weird_ is where this whole thing should stop, and Clarke being like _this_ isn’t really a deal breaker when there’s really good sex on the line, but it is unexpected.

She’s expecting that Clarke being all fired up will mean Clarke having her stripped naked right here on the couch and also probably managing to ruin at least a few of those neat piles on the coffee table before Lexa can even process what’s happened. She’s expecting to have a good few hours of whatever it is Clarke’s planning to do to her before she remembers to be pissed about the inevitable hour of reorganizing that she’ll have to do.

She’s not expecting the way that Clarke’s restlessness turns into aimlessness. Aimless kissing, where Clarke’s mouth never stops moving, but also doesn’t seek out new places on Lexa’s skin. Aimless hands that guide Lexa everywhere, but don’t respond to the places that, at this point, Lexa knows usually provoke a response. Aimless squirming that has Clarke rocking back and forth in Lexa’s lap but never seeking out friction that Clarke wouldn’t usually wait for.

“You’re distracted,” Lexa pulls back long enough to say, before she leans back in to nip gently at Clarke’s throat.

“I’m fine,” Clarke says, craning her neck to give Lexa more space. She finally lets go of Lexa’s hands, leaves them to fan out along her rib cage while her own come to rove along Lexa’s shoulders.

“You’re in your head,” Lexa challenges.

Clarke groans, but doesn’t respond. She’s still restless. Still aimless.

“You sure you want to—”

Clarke’s entire body stops moving and she frowns at Lexa.

“I invited myself over, right?” Clarke says, as though she wasn’t just arguing that she was sent for. “You should know I’d only do that for one reason.”

Clarke waits a beat, then sinks more heavily against Lexa’s lap, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the lingering summer weather or the simmering anger or if Clarke’s skin has always bled heat like this and Lexa just hasn’t been paying enough attention.

If Lexa were Clarke’s friend, she’d tell her to call Lincoln, to talk out whatever it is that’s bothering her instead of trying to smother her feelings in orgasms. But they have rules; they have a list of things they’ve agreed to do and agreed not to do. Giving each other advice isn’t a fine point on either side, but, clearly, advice isn’t what Clarke came for. They have rules, and, also, they aren’t friends.

“Bedroom?” Lexa asks then, instead of waiting for Clarke to roll her eyes and storm off into the night.

Clarke practically drags her upstairs, leaving a trail of their clothes along the way.

The trick to dealing with Clarke’s worst moods, Lexa realizes, _finally_ , after about a decade of knowing her, is to let her ride it out. So to speak, of course.

 

 

Two hours later, after most of the heat wave that Clarke brought with her has dissipated into something closer to a warm glow, they lay side by side in Lexa’s bed trying to catch their breath. Lexa’s breathing calms before Clarke’s, so she hears the moment when the blonde’s quick in-outs turn into a sigh while she stares up at the ceiling.

It isn’t like earlier, not some heavy sigh that makes her body droop with the weight of it—not that Lexa’s studying her from the corner of her eye or anything, and not that it’s her job to catalogue Clarke’s sighs, because that would be weird, and weird would warrant an ending, even if it meant putting a stop to things before Clarke could notice the cataloguing itself—but it’s still a sigh, and, naturally, Lexa assumes it’ll have some meaning.

Lexa waits for the huffiness to return. Waits for Clarke to prove that even all of Lexa’s most enthusiastic attentions haven’t offset her mood. Waits for her to slip out of rumpled sheets, redress herself, and leave in the same sort of whirlwind she came in, even if she’s lost some of her steam.

And, even if none of that happens, even if Clarke’s sigh is just the sound of contentment clawing its way through her, Lexa waits for her to leave.

There are rules, and one of them is that, now that they’re both finished, Clarke should be leaving. For the last few weeks, it’s kept things simple; they’re both good at agreeing to come when called for—or texted for—and they’re good at avoiding the trappings of cuddling or pillow talk and they’re good at leaving when one or both of them is too tired to keep going.

It keeps things simple.

So, Clarke sighs, and Lexa waits. One moment, two moments, three. She resolves herself to ignore the quiet growl of her stomach until after her front door has swung shut again. Wipes at her mouth. Pulls her ponytail holder back out of her wild hair and drops it on her bedside table, doesn’t bother trying to smooth it. Waits yet a few moments longer before her stomach growls even louder and Lexa starts contemplating what she’s going to scrape together for a late dinner.

It feels like a long stretch of silence, so quiet, in fact, that it’s almost like each woman is alone with her thoughts, before Clarke gets up. She stretches in front of the foot of the bed, her back to Lexa, hands clasped and reaching for the ceiling. Lexa looks down her own nose to see the curve of the blonde’s naked back, her calves when she rocks up onto her toes, the way she twists her spine.

Then Clarke grabs her panties off the floor, balls them up in her fist, and she leaves the room.

All of that without a word. It suits Lexa just fine. They don’t owe each other formal greetings or goodbyes. Last week, Lexa distinctly remembers yelling _I don’t work for you_ while slipping out Clarke’s door just after the blonde shouted from her bedroom asking Lexa to fetch her phone from wherever she’d left it in her kitchen.

She gives Clarke a ten-minute grace period, time to call for a ride and get dressed and hopefully leave without either of them feeling compelled to make small talk.

Lexa peels herself out of bed when she’s sure that Clarke must be gone. She throws on sleep shorts and a t-shirt plus the fluffy slippers from her closet, then autopilots into the bathroom. After that, she meanders back downstairs to make herself a bowl of oatmeal, quick and easy.

She’s so busy turning on lights and picking up pieces of her own clothing as she makes her way toward the kitchen that she almost doesn’t notice Clarke picking at her cuticles on the living room couch. Lexa stops where she stands, her clothes slung over one shoulder in an uneven heap.

“Just called my Lyft,” Clarke says, not even looking up. She’s redressed, and only a little disheveled-looking. Her legs are crossed, her phone on the cushion beside her. The water glass she used earlier is again half full on the coaster she chose. “Took forever to find my bra.”

“Okay.”

There isn’t much else to say, really. They aren’t friends and Clarke should already be gone.

Lexa drops her clothes in a pile on the floor of her small laundry room and fights the urge to linger there instead of crossing paths with uncharacteristically quiet Clarke again. In the living room, she finds her phone among her stacks of paper. She stands on the side of the coffee table opposite Clarke while she checks it and she laughs to herself at the group text Lincoln just sent about catching up with one of their old classmates. Apparently, the other guy’s gotten really into magic tricks since college, much to Lincoln’s delight.

“Did you see,” Lexa asks, holding up her phone.

“Yeah,” Clarke says, “I’m going to call him when I get home. Have to catch him up on my date and get all the gossip on David Copperfield Jr., here.”

“God,” Lexa says, still more to herself than to Clarke as she looks at the attached selfie of Lincoln with an arm around Nate Miller’s shoulders and the other guy’s top hat on his bald head, “how is he still friends with ninety percent of the people he’s ever met?”

Clarke laughs softly along with Lexa while the brunette types out her response.

“Too friendly for his own good,” the blonde says, shaking her head fondly. “What do you want to bet he’s letting Nathan perform his whole act for him?”

Lexa rolls her eyes. “He’s probably having the time of his life.”

“Lincoln or Nate?” Clarke wonders aloud.

“Both, actually,” Lexa thinks.

They laugh, and it’s lightest Clarke’s seemed since she’s arrived—outside of Lexa’s bedroom, at least—and it’s not quite a shame, because Lexa doesn’t care exactly, but it’s _something_ when the doorbell rings and interrupts it.

“That’s for me,” Clarke says.

She sounds so sure of it that she’s left Lexa in confused silence and the blonde’s reaching for the doorknob before Lexa thinks to say, “This is _my_ house.”

But, sure enough, Clarke opens the door to a guy Lexa doesn’t know in a baseball cap and pressed polo. Lexa crosses her arms instinctively in her thin t-shirt. She stands aside while Clarke makes small talk with the guy, watches him hand her the paper bag he's carrying and then sign the receipt he holds out before he disappears and Clarke’s shutting the door again.

“What—” Lexa tries, but Clarke’s phone chimes on the couch, and then Clarke is thrusting the paper bag into Lexa’s hands and heading into the living room to get her phone, then the kitchen to grab her purse.

Lexa’s still frozen in confusion with the bag in her hands when Clarke comes back to slip into her heels.

“My Lyft is, like, thirty seconds away,” Clarke says, as though that explains everything.

“What is this,” Lexa finally gets out, holding out the bag.

Clarke rolls her eyes, but not with any malice.

“Thanks for not calling me a whiny bitch when you could’ve probably called me a whiny bitch,” is all she says before she’s wrenching open Lexa’s door and then closing it behind her.

When she's gone, Lexa pulls at the neat staples along the end of the bag to open it. Inside, there’s a sandwich. A turkey club, cut in halves, one with tomato, one without. There are packets of mayo and mustard underneath it. There’s a small, printed slip of paper taped to one of the halves with a message printed on it in quotation marks. It reads: _I prefer your tears to your freakishly loud stomach growling._

It isn’t what Lexa was expecting, but, at this point, she’s wondering if she ever really knows what to expect from Clarke. She also wonders whether this should be catalogued as weird or not.

As if on cue, her stomach growls again, more insistently this time, and Lexa reminds herself that there’s no rule about food.


End file.
